Users of Skype in German and English VoIP forums have been complaining about the automatic withdrawal of their Skype credit after inactivity in their account. Now a German court rules: Prepaid account withdrawal based on inactivity must stop! Up till now Skype tells users to call your Mum at least every 179 days or you will lose your SkypeOut credit balance! Spending two cents twice a year can be important.

Those who occasionally use O2 to get airtime in Germany may breathe easier in the future! Germany's fourth largest mobile company gets the red card from the High Regional Court of Munich. Several prepaid clauses are declared invalid.

Hopefully this new court ruling will be a wake up call to Skype about this inappropriate business practice of closing out the account balance after 180 days.

It’s not often you get a chance to look over the shoulder of engineers in their workshop. But that is what I did. QOOL LABS a Singapore based company, invited me to test some of the functionality and Bill, myself and Qool Labs staff did just that. By using a webcam I had visual contact and I was shown the alpha prototype print card we would be using during the test. So being in the workshop it was not a finished product, not even sitting in its box, just a print card connected to the PC running Skype.

Click it!

SkyQube in its basic configuration is giving you the opportunity to connect a PSTN/pots/landline to Skype. This is seen before but here the box is equipped with an impressive set of features. And the SkyQube² (SkyQube Square), is giving you access to your GSM network when you place your SIM card in the SkyQube²

Its HW supports SMS/text messaging on all three/four connections; and conference calls as well. It has a speaker and microphone. The 4 buttons can be preconfigured to call contacts and the left most button can establish a conference between them. The button between the + − (volume buttons) is the Qool button this loads your preferred call ‘forwarding’ setup and lights up to show forwarding is on, no need to access your PC.

The Skype peer to peer technology is apparently going to be tested as the network base for a Battle Field and Combat Information System which will encompass a whole Battle Scenario. Amongst other delivering real time Friend & Foe information on all objects. Is this a response to all the pressure and legal threats against Skype we have seen?

27. march 2006
Maersk Data Defence and L-3 Communications – Henschel have been selected by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems to provide Multi Function Consoles (MFC) for the US Navy’s newest class of ships, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

The communications system has a high capacity digital communications switch, developed by Danish company Maersk Data Defence (formerly Infocom) together with Karlskrona, which interconnects the voice and data communications channels. The system provides internal communications or open conference lines and access to external communications with various radio links and land-based networks.

The CEBit trade show is possibly the largest consumer electronics trade show in the world. This year it was attended by 450,000 people. You would think Skype would be there, wouldn't you? There were lots of Skype posters, Skype devices, and the Skype application was loaded on all the PC’s in the visitors lounge. BUT NO SKYPE! NO SKYPE STAFF.

It took me three-days to visit ‘Hall 12’ and ‘Hall 13’. This was space for the big Telco’s, Cellular, Providers and TV/radio stations: Lot of IP-telephony, VoIP and Wireless, Cordless, VoWiFI (Voice over WiFi), SIP on WLAN, Voice on SIP, IP communication, some video systems. But then Cebit is so big!

The best thing was when you needed to rest CEBit had great resting places...

That's me wearing the blue-checkered table cloth. I am with the RTX USB DualPhone product manager Carsten Helmuth.

Looks like the Netgear WiFi phone for Skype is real. I did a short test at the NetGear Booth.

The bad news? We still have a couple of months to wait! Damn. It felt so good. I just wanted to take it home!