Tamas Henning

I would like to start my comeback to the blogging world with an excellent news. Skype along with Hutchinson’s 3 has launched a new sensational product to the mobile market: The 3Skypephone. So what is this? It’s a mobile phone and a Skype client all in one. Yes this means if your phone is turned on, you’re signed in and you have a 3 mobile signal (you know the UMTS signal) then you’re on Skype as well. So you can be called and you can call all of your Skype contacts right out of pocket while reading in the London subway. This is truly a revolutionary product which will rattle the mobile market for years to come. I will be rather curious to see the competitor’s reactions to this launch.

What does this launch actually mean? This means the following: free international calling. If I see my friend from the US that he’s online I can call him up and we don’t pay a dime. Or why not talk for free with your friends? You both get 3Skypephones and talk until your heart pleases. Oh and I forgot to mention another feature, chat’s. Yup you can chat for free as well via Skype.

It only has one downside to me at least. I can’t get it This product is only available in Hutchinson 3 network which is not present in the Romanian market, but maybe in a while this product will be available by more operators.

I’m off on Tuesday (but leaving on Monday) to Prague for about of week. To be honest I can’t wait to get there and to relax a bit. Since I will be in Prague I will be attending the Skype Partners night as well to meet up with some friends from Skype. I’ll be staying in Prague until the 16^th of September relaxing and visiting the city for the second time already.

But also I have some news. Two new countries now have SkypeIn. Ireland and Mexico… Villu from Skype was the one to break the news on their blog, and I was pleasantly surprised when I read his post, and found that he quoted Borat So as Borat would say “Is nice”.

I will be posting next time directly from Prague, hopefully with insight on what happened on the Skype Partners night.

I finally had the time to sit down and write a proper post about the Skype outage that happened last week. I have read many posts about the outage out of some were criticizing Skype and some were supporting them in their struggle to get everything working again. I don’t deny at all that I myself have posted a blog entry on this topic and later on removed it (see previous post) due to personal reasons. I felt like my comments were irrelevant to this subject at that point, and wanted to wait until the dust settles and I have something firm to comment. And this is the reason why I have removed my former blog entry. Jean from Skype Numerology asked a question which I would like to comment (from a personal point of view): “why did Skype communicate so badly during the crisis?” I wouldn’t say Skype communicated badly during the crisis. As I read through Heartbeat during the crisis, I was pleasantly surprised that Villu and Sten kept informing people on the situation even at 4:00AM GMT. And for this I would like to thank firstly Villu and Sten but also the staff who stayed overtime to get everything fixed as fast as it was possible.

Today after reading Villu’s post on the happenings (see here) I have to say almost all of my questions regarding this have been answered. It’s true that these questions should have been answered earlier but at least we aren’t completely kept in the dark about the incident. Better late than never? However I would like to end this blog post with a question especially those who criticized Skype for the outage: Do you know of a single operator (mobile, landline, VoIP, etc…) that didn’t have at least 1 (one) major outage during its life? If so which one?

(Please note that this post is purely my personal opinion)

Yesterday Skype hosted a “London Geek Event”
at their office and I asked today my good friend Raul Liive from Skype what happened because I couldn’t attend this event (however wanted to). And he told me about the things that have happened there. I might say it had to be a blast, so I regret not going there. There is one thing that caught my attention while we were talking a little company which runs http://www.quotationsbook.com/ basically a small quote site for every type of mood you might have. So why not go and check them out? I know I like the page

Well besides today being a very hot day here in Bucharest I can say a lot of things has happened that is worth mentioning.

So for starters Jaanus Kase from Skype announced a feature for SkypeOutâ„¢ that was in demand by a lot of people worldwide. So what is this feature? Caller-ID, in a few words if you have a SkypeInâ„¢ number in one of the selected countries (currently the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, Estonia and Poland) and if you active this service for free then when you call anyone from your Skype then your SkypeInâ„¢ number will appear. Now how cool is that? Anyways check out Jaanus’ post for more details.

And the other news I wanted to talk about is related to Joost. You might not be aware of this new program called Joost (formerly known as The Venice Project) but this new venture has been started by none other than Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. However this relatively new program doesn’t have much to do with Skype besides their founders. The reason I’m putting emphasis on this is because currently as a Skype Forum moderator I see a lot of posts regarding Joost, but the fact is that the Skype forums doesn’t have a separate forum for Joost. So I’ll recommend you a very good site where you can talk about Joost and it’s called JoostFan and it also host’s a forum where you can talk about Joost and its upcoming public launch.