Skype Journal – October 2011 News Roundup

Microsoft finished buying Skype. Ballmer’s PR, Bates’ PR. Courtney, York, Slashdot opine. Most folks thought this happened last April. I thought the EU should have attached strings to the deal, but they didn’t.

Gotta wonder if Microsoft would still have bought Skype if they had to pay US taxes on the deal.

A Mint.com infographic using Forbes data: AT&T got $1.05 Billion in tax rebates on FY2010 $18.2 Billion sales. So the US government paid AT&T more than Skype sold all year.

Skype filed DMCA take down notices against an engineer who reverse engineered part of Skype’s earlier communication protocols, alleging a blog infringed copyright on Skype source code.

Skype started updating the Libyan flag emoticon (flag:ly) from the old solid green one of Muammar Gadhafi to the new flag chosen by Libya’s revolutionaries. Facebook petition to make the change. If you don’t see a “horizontal tricolour of red, black and green with a white crescent and star centered on the black stripe” in your IM now, you should see it in one of the next few downloads. Already updated on the Skype.com web site. Skype rates 30.2¢/minute to landlines plus connection fee.

How do investors follow an $8.5 Billion exit? Former Skype owner Andreessen Horowitz is raising $900 million to buy more skypes.

A security hack could reveal your Skype profile and IP address and what bittorrent files you’re downloading. Read the paper from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, NYU-Poly, and the French research institute INRIA. Your browser gives up your IP address every time you visit a web page so this is most interesting to people avoiding surveillance and actively protecting their privacy. Tip: use a different VPN for Skype and each app you use to avoid the cross-referencing that might lead to blackmail.

The October snowstorms that hit the US Northeast put Skype to work as an alternative when telephony and roads were offline for a few days. A friend in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote “I’m sorta acting as a base for all my relatives and coworkers after this snowstorm.  relaying calls and messages and such between people with no power and such. my t-mobile phone has no service.  my verizon phone has intermittent failures and dropped calls.  skype works beautifully, however if I’m dealing with peoples’ cell phones, they’re the weak end of the call.”

Jim Courtney: “If Skype wants to have a viable developer program we need to see results soon that can bring revenue to the developers.”

Skype renamed the Public API to Desktop API. More accurate.

Several APIs were rebranded as “SkypeKit for Desktop”, still in a restricted public beta.

SkypeKit for Desktop now supports two-party video calls.

A new beta of Trillian for Windows is using SkypeKit. It won’t allow cross-network IM or calling but it will let you turn off your Skype-branded client.

Dan York: “Meanwhile… is this renaming setting the stage for the release of some new client-less APIs? Let’s hope so… ” Dan worries the new realtime communication features (WebRTC/RTCWEB) being built into nextgen browsers will be hidebound to PSTN telephony instead of new over-the-top networks.

Microsoft announced their commercial-use Kinect for Windows SDK will be available early in 2012. Think we’ll see an official Skype for Kinect edition?

Korea’s Pantech will bring Kinnect-style gestural commands to Android mobile phones. A year from now I expect we’ll see this on core Windows, iOS, and Android mobile OSs.

Data Without Borders launched, a data science NGO bringing statisticians to small private sector big data sets. Personal data was the focus of the October Internet Identity Workshop.

VoIP pioneer Alec Saunders joined RIM, leading its Blackberry developer program. See sessions from this month’s BBcon devcon.

Skype is quietly retiring old thin-client services for UK mobile operator 3. Courtney says “I would imagine 3 would have to be working on a strategy to phase out its initial Skype service and transition their customers to newer platforms.” Still available in the UK, Ireland, and Australia for now, it has been discontinued in Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, and Sweden. Andy Abramson: “like so many sideline projects that ‘proved things’ now Skype is back to being just a IM based calling service online with a few hooks to the PSTN.” 4G and smarter phones are relegating Skype thin-client services to developing markets.

Download Skype for Windows 5.6. This update fixes a few bugs, unbundles Google apps (Google is retiring its Desktop which bundled Skype), and gives credit for third-party components. Or get 5.5 (5.5.0.119) which corrects some issues with the Skype home page popping up when in compact mode, fixes memory leaks in Skype Click-to-Call. 

30.5 million people signed in to Skype at the same time on Monday, 10 October 2011, a new high-water-mark for Skype dialtone since the end of March. A seasonal thing, fueled by more than a million people downloading Skype desktop apps in the days before. I’m guessing about 180 million active users this week.

Just for comparison, Rafe Needleman reports “Zynga revealed that there are 232 million active monthly users of the network, and 60 million daily users. The company records 2 billion play minutes each day.”

RIP Steve Jobs. All sorts of milestones in my career were directly influenced by Steve. My first job out of college: selling Apple IIs. First well paying job after being down and out: Mac desktop publishing for an artist. First dive into design as a discipline: studying about the anthropology research that lead to the Mac. First usability research: books on the difference between the mac/windows/command line. 

I had a poster of the NeXT in my bedroom for years, after I saw Jobs demo one at the Berkeley Mac User Group in the old round Physics lecture hall. the idea that you could engineer hardware to support a Unix operating system AND make it even friendlier for newbies than a Mac was gobsmacking. The whole stand-on-a-stage thing and carefully tell your story was part of my toolkit long before he showed his mastery of that, but Steve added a real appreciation of the subject matter, joy for the value he showed, excitement for the geekery.

The iPhone wasn’t my first mobile phone, or even the first I loved (I miss my N90 sometimes). It was the first that made me use it like a computer, made me want to build apps again, dream the entrepreneurial dream. and keep the internet in my pocket. Damn. Damn. I’m typing this on a MacBook in a pizza joint down the street from the Apple store. And they’re playing sonorous sad music.

Europe approves Microsoft buying Skype without strings, follows the US. Microsoft says it is happy. Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan are weighing in but are unlikely to have a say on the deal. Jim Courtney marks the progress.

Michigan State professors want a law to permit distance weddings. Their proposal. Adam Candeub and Mae Kuykendall support e-marriage and e-ritual in all 50 US states. “States should authorize marriages of those not present within their territorial boundaries. We demonstrate that states have the sovereign power to authorize marriage performed anywhere, and historically have blessed marriages in distant locations.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer takes Skype video call-ins for its live football TV show. Skype clevelanddotcom.

Tango for Windows is out and, from Forbes, Tango To Be Windows Phone/Mango’s First Videocalling Service, Leapfrogging Skype. imho, first doesn’t matter as much as best fit and most used.

IP lobbyists try to hobble the new Hollywood.

Llama stories Skyped.

Skype WiFi coverage of Manhattan may improve thanks to Boingo’s deal with Towerstream.

Florida soldier sees baby daughter before dying in Afghanistan.

Pennsylvania synagogue offers skyped Hebrew school to bar/bat mitzvah students.

I wish I’d seen Janet Vartinen’s talk “Collaboration: Is the Employee in the Driver’s Seat?” at the 7th Annual Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo. “As social and personal collaboration tools are finding their way into the business environment IT departments are being challenged. …  It is not just about engineering anymore. This session will discuss successful methods to bridge the collaboration gap…”

Phil Wolff consults with Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for effective people. Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.