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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
I’ve long been a fan of Rebecca MacKinnon, a reporter turned Internet civil society advocate. Society’s multi-decade conversation about privacy, censorship, and access are turning into a fight for control over the Internet. It’s a contest between government, corporate, and citizen power. Rebecca uses her TED talk to tell stories of this conflict among these three powers. And she challenges us: “how does the Internet evolve in a citizen-centric manner?” Rebecca’s coming book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, discusses a need for technology changes and political innovation “so the Internet serves the world’s people, and not the other way around.” She describes the symptoms of this power imbalance in her talk, but I hope Concent is prescriptive. What’s the path to a future where both companies and governments are accountable to free citizens?
Facebook’s customers are its advertisers, making Facebook’s users the product sold to advertisers. This creates a tension between the needs of advertisers and the needs of users. Facebook’s success has been walking that line closely and carefully, minimizing the perception of intrusion while aggressively pimping their users to merchants.
Skype’s users paid for SkypeOut and SkypeIn from the start, accounting for 90% of revenue, so Skype’s bottom-line interests were aligned with its users.
Skype’s management slowly eroded that alignment.
Employers.Skype Manager and the Skype for Business desktop client for Windows give your company control over Skype credits, privacy (your manager can see all the SkypeOut calls you make), specific features (your manager can turn off IM or file transfers, for example) and many user preferences (see the Admin guide to Skype).
Advertisers. Skype produces ad revenue through business directory listings, toolbar and web site Click-and-Call ad services, some in-app display ads in the “home” tab, and toolbars. The newest version of Skype for Windows, the 5.3 Beta, now shifts focus away from where you left Skype, pulling you out of context, showing you the latest big advert. You cannot return to your conversations without dismissing the ad, an annoying usability hit.
Distribution Partners. Skype works closely with phone companies and ISPs to promote Skype to their customers. These deals come with strings.
The Skype mobile app for Verizon came with an exclusivity, hurting US Skype users who weren’t on Verizon’s network.
Those same versions came CALEA wiretap-ready, making all Skype calls less secure (you can’t know if other Skype users are using a surveillance friendly version).
Skype’s TOM-Skype partnership in China similarly walked back Skype’s original spyware-free premise in exchange for opening up their largest market; TOM-Skype is free to package Skype software with spyware and malware as ordered/suggested by Chinese government agencies and common business practice.
Skype lowered call quality for its first Verizon Android apps at Verizon’s insistence.
Skype’s 3 Skypephone partnership in the UK restricted SkypeOut to international calls, even when domestic SkypeOut rates were cheaper than 3’s.
Developers. Half of eBay’s revenue comes from transactions driven through APIs. Many of Skype’s managers from that era learned that lesson. eBay listens closely to their developer channel, sometimes wrestling over fees, access to customer data, and terms. As Skype’s platform products (embedded, cloud, mobile) reach programmers, Skype will be tempted to meter access, charging for use of its APIs. We haven’t seen Skype choose between developer and user interests. Yet.
Microsoft. This is prospective: Ballmer and Bates committed to building Skype into a range of Microsoft products. Will the Xbox division be Skype’s customer? Or the Xbox players? Live Messenger’s advertisers or Messenger’s users? Bing’s advertisers or Bing’s users?
Skype may never again report its revenue by source, a strong alignment signal. So watch Skype’s behavior. Does Skype serve you over all other others? Or does Skype deserve the high customer scrutiny and alternatives Facebook inspires?
Can engineers understand what you say in an encrypted Skype call? Four researchers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill think so. Andrew White, Austin Matthews, Kevin Snow, and Fabian Monrose presented their paper, Phonotactic Reconstruction of Encrypted VoIP Conversations: Hookt on fon-iks (PDF), yesterday to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy here in Oakland, California. They show you can find patterns in your encrypted VoIP traffic, match those patterns to sounds of speech, and produce a text transcript of your call. Their “VoIP Conversation Reconstruction Process” looks like this:
Here’s the abstract:
In this work, we unveil new privacy threats against Voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications. Although prior work has shown that the interaction of variable bit-rate codecs and length-preserving stream ciphers leaks information, we show that the threat is more serious than previously thought. In particular, we derive approximate transcripts of encrypted VoIP conversations by segmenting an observed packet stream into subsequences representing individual phonemes and classifying those subsequences by the phonemes they encode. Drawing on insights from the computational linguistics and speech recognition communities, we apply novel techniques for unmasking parts of the conversation. We believe our ability to do so underscores the importance of designing secure (yet efficient) ways to protect the confidentiality of VoIP conversations.
“when the audio is encoded using variable bit rate codecs, the lengths of encrypted VoIP packets can be used to identify the phrases spoken within a call. Our results indicate that a passive observer can identify phrases from a standard speech corpus within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases.”
They suggest preventing this kind of analysis will cut audio fidelity and use more bits.
Don’t panic. Yet. Their work proves the point but the four haven’t created a technology ready for the marketplace. Their research tools only support a few American English dialects, assume favorable conditions for collecting VoIP streams (like finding all your packets on your local area network), and assume the stream uses variable speed encoding. These, along with design for large scale text extraction, are just engineering barriers for the willing, to be overcome with money and talent.
They’ve proven it can be done. So I expect two things to happen. Money and talent will apply this work to private and public sector surveillance. Meanwhile, VoIP services will start making text extraction more difficult.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in December 2010 that governments much have a search warrant to secretly seize and search emails stored by email services, ensuring protected privacy of personal communication and due process. I take it this requirement applies to Skype voice calls.
Does this precedent apply to conversation metadata like chat histories, call logs, contact lists, file transfers, IP addresses, and profile data? As Skype continues building cloud Skype platforms and gateways, more user data will live on Skype-controlled servers. Will Skype store that data encrypted, so thieves won’t be able to use it? Will Skype give up those encryption keys without court orders? Should you trust Skype with your personal and corporate conversation data?
This is a USA-centric post. Transnational services like Skype’s and Microsoft’s are only as secure as their weakest local leak. This is as true for country-by-country legal protection for your personal data as it is for physical and software protections. Where does Skype host data centers? What rules apply for surrendering user data to governments or to private parties in law suits? A thorough security appraisal would require Skype to disclose data center locations.
Beecher Tuttle speculated Skype bought the assets of group text startup 3Jam. Skype’s texting features are… uninspiring? Hiring 3Jam’s Enlai Chu might fix that. Or is it feature creep?
CallByText compromises Skype security, requiring your Skype name and password, setting you up for identity theft. (Thanks, Hudson)
Reuters reports Google and Facebook talked about buying Skype. They didn’t talk to each other, although that would be interesting. Like this is something new? Skype’s corporate affairs folks must talk to potential buyers, if only to understand a non-IPO deal space.
Ubergizmo unboxes the Logitech TV Cam for Skype. “At CES 2011, Skype on TV was a huge hit, particularly among seniors. I’ve never seen so many seemingly retired people at CES, and they were almost all excited by this.”
EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn says “companies that stand up for users will do better in the long run if people are informed and can include this information in their decision-making about what services to use.”
1. Risk: Impersonation. Skype lets you present yourself using any name. You could present yourself as someone else or have your identity confused with another user.
My take: I’m going to rate this 1 scared face out of 5 on the fear-meter. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Systems enable protected speech through anonymity, pseudonymity, and even using a pseudonym similar to someone else’s real name.
Future: Skype can offer to validate identities, either directly (credit cards) or through partners (banks, web sites, employers, governments), and to share a “this looks like a real person who holds this name in real life” badge. Trust builds network value.
2. Risk: Eavesdropping. PI says Skype lets third-parties manipulate downloads because Skype.com doesn’t use https to encrypt file downloads.
My take:2 of 5 on the fear-meter. The opportunity exists for network hackers to intercept and rewrite downloads, burdening you with spyware, malware, etc. There are easier strategies, like co-opting the source of downloads by law enforcement or political powers, as seen in China and other countries.
Future: Skype could encrypt. It’s relatively cheap for Skype to use Transport Layer Security for downloads. So you’ll only receive malware authorized by Skype’s managers and partners.
3. Risk: Eavesdropping. PI says Skype’s speech compression method (variable bit rate) can reveal what words are spoken, even after encryption. They do this by matching the encrypted profiles of phonemes (the sounds that make up words) with unencrypted profiles. They claim phrases can be identified with a 50% to 80% accuracy, citing a Johns Hopkins University research project by Charles V. Wright, Lucas Ballard, Scott E. Coull, Fabian Monrose, and Gerald M. Masson (go Blue Jays!). The report’s abstract:
Despite the rapid adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP), its security implications are not yet fully understood. Since VoIP calls may traverse untrusted networks, packets should be encrypted to ensure confidentiality. However, we show that when the audio is encoded using variable bit rate codecs, the lengths of encrypted VoIP packets can be used to identify the phrases spoken within a call. Our results indicate that a passive observer can identify phrases from a standard speech corpus within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases. Clearly, such an attack calls into question the efficacy of current VoIP encryption standards. In addition, we examine the impact of various features of the underlying audio on our performance and discuss methods for mitigation.
My take:3 of 5 on the fear-meter. Yes, it is possible, in theory. Enterprise and government customers will care about this risk and want stronger protection. Meanwhile, crackers, academics, and intelligence agencies are productizing the analysis.
Why only three scared faces? If Nuance, Google Voice, and Skype transcripts are so horrible with raw voice streams, phoneme extraction and phrase encoding must be extremely hard to do with compressed and encrypted data. So only 3 for now.
Future: Skype and others who offer encrypted audio streams will tweak compression and encryption. It may cost a little more audio bandwidth and more CPU/battery. So don’t expect those changes to come too soon.
31 March is the deadline for RIM to give realtime surveillance of Blackberry users to Indian intelligence and law enforcement officials. Nokia started testing its compliance. Will Skype build a back door for India’s cops, spies, and soldiers?
Skype Journal: First off, let’s talk about the problems. Why do people subscribe to virtual private networks to use Skype? What triggers their purchase?
Phil Blancett. Unfortunately some countries believe that Skype undermines their own profit driven VOIP industries that they have. I saw a recent interview with a Dubai official who complained that it’s not fair that Skype allows their consumers a cheaper VOIP system than what they provide. His explanation was they had spent billions on their infrastructure, and to allow Skype to come in and take all the profits was unacceptable.
When the average customer in Dubai can save $500 or more a month by using Skype instead of their state driven VOIP services, they will do just about anything to procure a VPN account. And luckily for them, it’s not difficult at all.
SJ. How widespread are these problems? How many people are affected? Where in the world?
Blancett. Unfortunately the list seems to be growing and not decreasing. Dubai, Belize, or UAE blocks Skype and China can turn if off at times.
SJ. How do VPNs solve that problem? How does it work?
Blancett. We allow a secure connection over our network and ports, thereby bypassing the customers Internet Service Provider connection. With our OpenVPN packages we are able to set the customer up on custom ports, making it near impossible to be blocked.
SJ. I have Skype on my mobile phone, on my PCs, and in several pieces of hardware where a Skype app is embedded. Can VPNs help me with all of them?
Blancett. Yes VPN’s work on all those devices. Keep in mind though that some locations like Oman can block PPTP ports, if that happens then we put the customer on a OpenVPN SSL package. OpenVPN SSL packages require software to be installed, PPTP / L2TP / SSTP packages work within the Operating System existing Network Connections (think back on the old dial up modem days, when you put in a server name, user name and password).
SJ. What’s the process for installing a VPN? Are we talking hardware? Installing software?
I’m looking at today’s Inbox Love Conferenceagenda through a filter of Skype product and ecosystem strategy. What can Skype learn from email’s long legacy? Where might they fit together?
A unified inbox – with chats, social/work updates, emails, events, tasks, and calls – would be very useful; one place to check. http://mail.Skype.com? Twilio’s Jeff Lawson is speaking on this.
Rich caller ID. Rapportive could easily tell you about incoming callers and the other people in chat rooms. They could deliver a rich, social-media-informed caller-ID for incoming Skype calls, assuming Skype offered a useful web platform or in-client extensions.
With inbox overload comes the need for relevance filtering. Xobni could easily offer data mining of Skype conversations. That’s if Skype offered real client extension or cloud platforms. Xobni’s Jeff Bonforte will speak.
Most inboxes barely tell you about threads of conversation, let alone relationships. The folks at Graphight could help you renew old relationships, cultivate valuable ones, and invest in those that matter to you. Skype lets them fall off your radar if you’re not careful.
Spam, identity theft, and other security issues apply to both; crossover of lessons learned?
Email is part of our identity infrastructure. So are telephone accounts. When will we trust Skype accounts enough to authenticate users for authorizations that matter?
Hosted email is becoming the rule, not the exception. Yet the ability to migrate gigabytes of archives from one email account to another isn’t universally easy or even promised. True for Skype history and archives too, still tied to a given desktop and not stached (stash + cache?) in the cloud. Offer a graceful exit, please.
Inboxes come with contact lists, accumulated from the spew of email from subscriptions, strangers and acquaintances. Skype offers few opportunities for weak ties to become contacts, or for discovering potential friends, family and colleagues.
A contrast: Email is used for formal communication; IM for casual and collegial conversations. Do you break how the tools are used when you mix those contexts?
Email traffic had been losing out to instant messaging for years. Now IM (down 8.3%) is losing out to chat and updates inside of social networks. Clearly, conversation follows (a) where your friends are and (b) where the context is fresh and relevant. Do you have more friends in Skype than X? Do you find more things to discuss inside of Skype?
Would you want an email/Skype gateway? Email a message to a Skype name? Read it in your Skype client? Reply from Skype and read it in email? IM’s backed up or mirrored on a list server? Could be very useful in collaboration.
image credit: Claire Graves from Poke London from when she worked on the 2009 Skype Store makeover.
Make settings visible and easy to use. Facebook has made a series of changes to its privacy settings over the past year, but one of the risks is that the more complex and difficult to find the settings become, the less likely people are to go in and change them.
Allow users to opt in. Facebook takes a substantial amount of criticism because it chooses to automatically opt users in to new settings and features. The giant social network can get away with this thanks to its sheer size, but smaller companies and services run the risk of alienating their users.
That is so 2005. “Opt in” and “easy to use” are condescending now that users demand more control, transparency, flexibility, and portability.
I know Ingram could go a lot deeper. For starters:
Resolve that customers own their data.
Say it publicly. Repeat often. Reinforce your commitment through policy, procedure, design, operations, and governance. This includes user ability to bring their data from other services to yours, to move and remove their data from your service, to keep the authoritative form of key data elements outside of your service.
Add “List the privacy implications” to your checklists.
Check in new code? Change a web page? Adjust pricing? Whatever your business practice, ask about the privacy and data portability implications. Embed that question in your routines at every stage of your product life cycle.
Federate your customer data policies.
You are not the only custodian of your customers’ data. You put customer data in the hands of other companies all the time. And they, in turn, put it in the hands of yet other companies that you’ll never meet. Your privacy and portability policies may fit your market, but are your suppliers aligned? Can they make the same commitments on your behalf? Are they committing to protect customer data as much as you are? Are they keeping your customers’ data in jurisdictions that protect your rights and your customers’ rights? You need to hold summits, or at least conference calls, to make sure your ecosystem share core values and practices.
Trust but verify.
Set up surveillance so your teams are the first to discover privacy breaches. Audit your own systems regularly. Set up Red Teams to test your ability to protect customer data. Test your partners.
Plan for leaks.
It’s going to happen. Practice your response and put your checklist together now. You and your team won’t have time to think deeply or well under fire.
Back laws and public efforts to give customers equity in their data.
The law protects your ownership of a paper clip more than they do your Facebook profile. Support the invention and evolution of property, identity, privacy, and creative rights and laws that make sense for the rest of the 21st century.
Meg Whitman (Republican) and Jerry Brown (Democrat) are in a close race for governor of the US state of California. Who would be better for Skype? IMHO, Jerry.
Let’s compare them on Internet access, net neutrality, and privacy.
I’d frame Meg’s positions as corporatist conservative so long as it doesn’t conflict with being a social conservative. Regulation is bad, regulation of corporations is evil, corporations are what make this country great, their leaders are the ones who create jobs and freedom.
So when asked about Internet access for all Californians, she’d say state government needs to get out of the way of businesses who’d want to serve them and cities shouldn’t compete with private companies to offer muni broadband or fiber backbones.
If you asked her about net neutrality, she’d say you want net neutrality but you want the government to stay out of it, that industry will make it work.
If you ask about strengthening and enforcing personal privacy laws, she’d support them in name only, saying she wouldn’t want to hurt businesses or interfere with public safety or national defense or to create new rights for sexual minorities or other people.
By now you’ve seen Skype for Windows 5 lets you sign in to Facebook and see your timeline. A change to Skype‘s privacy practice is a side effect. If you’re signed in to Facebook from the tab, you’ll see text, avatars and photos from Facebook. Those materials are pulled from Facebook servers.
A few examples. An HTML container for the timeline is served off of facebook.com’s OnlineFriendsPagelet. The Facebook logo is served from static.ak.fbcdn.net, Facebook’s content distribution network. Skype pulls Javascript files from a family of servers called channel.facebook.com. Timeline updates come from api-read.facebook.com. Your Skype client is pulling data directly from Facebook instead of Skype relaying your requests and Facebook’s answers.
With each call to a Facebook server, Skype gives your IP address to Facebook. From your IP address Facebook can locate you, approximately. They can follow your IP address through time and space.
Ad Age reports more on Skype click-to-call advertising. "Clicks are good. Calls are the prize" is a Marchex advertising network tag line. Skype’s browser toolbars for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox always turned phone numbers into links that launch Skype calls. With Skype’s Marchex partnership, advertisers can sponsor some of those links and place a message to encourage calling.
Marchex is selling Skype links on web pages owned by Yelp, Yahoo! Google and anyplace else your browser detects phone numbers. The only way for Marchex to know if a link in your browser is sponsored is for your toolbar to send the link to Marchex.
Marchex pitches "Call Advertising."
Advertisers, weary of increasing search and online lead prices, are reconsidering calls as a lead form.
Mobile search will provide advertisers a new, efficient channel for driving calls.
Opportunities to drive calls via online and mobile directories will multiply.
Paid directory assistance will transition to ad-supported and drive calls to advertisers.
PC-based call providers will launch massive, ad-supported models to boost adoption.
"Skype has quietly become one of the largest providers of calls in the world. The company currently has over 500 million registered users and is growing at approximately 40% year-over-year. Skype does this largely on the strength of peer-to-peer calls, supporting both voice and video. However, Skype users do not make PC-based calls to businesses as frequently, largely because Skype charges an incremental rate for calls to non-Skype phone numbers.
Determined to find ways to grow its share of these calls, Skype will seek ways to reduce or eliminate the cost to Skype users.
This move will undoubtedly give rise to another wave of opportunities for advertisers to drive calls with media dollars. By underwriting calls on the user’s behalf, advertisers will be able to unlock very efficient modes of communication with prospective customers. Over time, advertisers will likely discover the power of PC-based calls that give them the opportunity to leverage online assets to supplement the call with visual experiences like product demonstrations, technical explanations, or application processes.
This same phenomenon will extend over time into mobile and smartphones."
Phone numbers will re-emerge in online ad copy due to pressure from local advertisers.
Carriers will continue their transition to ad-supported models.
As calls become more central to the marketing mix, contact "lists" will emerge.
Questions Skype has been unwilling to answer since the launch.
User privacy and experience:
Is there a user preference to disable adverts without turning off the other toolbar features?
What browsing data is passed to the ad network? What are the privacy options for this data? Can I inspect the data sent to the ad network?
What calling data is passed to the ad network and the advertiser? Privacy options? Can I see the data?
How much of a speed/performance hit will the browser experience whilst the toolbar checks phone numbers with Marchex? Does this slow a page’s rendering or will the Skype link+sponsorship icon appear only after the page is rendered?
Advertiser and publisher concerns:
I’m sure you’ve tested this type of advertising. How effective has this been? Compared to linkification without the "Free call" message and blue color?
Do you remember calling behavior? How do you use that data to improve ad targeting?
Out of the millions of downloaded Skype toolbars, how many are active? How many have linkification turned on?
What can web designers do to make it easier for the toolbar to recognized and properly encode phone numbers?
Can an advertiser block "dial for free" links on certain web pages or sites while buying them on others?
Can an advertiser restrict ads to certain times-of-day to assure customer service levels?
Can an advertiser restrict ads based on the language of a web page?
Can an advertiser restrict ads if the call tariff is too high, say from an island where the call rate is more than $1 per minute?
Can a sponsored link drive the caller to a direct Skype-to-Skype call when the advertiser has a Skype for SIP or Skype for Asterisk enabled call center or another company Skype account?
Are site operators (Google, Yahoo!, Yelp, etc.) compensated for ads layered over their sites by the toolbar?
Can an advertiser place offers ("25% off if you call in the next five minutes") near their phone number?
In what countries and for what markets will click and call advertising be available?
Which kinds of advertisers will not be allowed to purchase these ad units? Adult? Political? Gambling?
What are the technical requirements for this service? Specific browsers, operating systems, etc.? Which Skype toolbars?
Can I build Skype-Marchex linkification into my company’s toolbar or site app? What is your developer program?
Here’s the video commercial, aimed at advertisers.
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. 
Jim Courtney: “If Skype wants to have a viable developer program we need to see results soon that can bring revenue to the developers.” 
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. 
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. 
Brazil
Turkey
If you’re signed in to Facebook from the tab, you’ll see text, avatars and photos from Facebook. Those materials are pulled from Facebook servers. 
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