remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m our US blogger, writing regularly about Skype news, views and the inside track on the company from a uniquely American angle.
Back in late 1995, I was new on the tech beat at the Chicago Sun-Times.
I asked to cover the Net because I was tired of the [...]

I’m staring at the blinking cursor on an empty page. This page. And it occurs to me that five years ago today, Skype was that cursor. An impatient speck on the world’s radar screen, vying for attention that would help write a new chapter in the history of communication.
With the benefit of five years of [...]

I posted a few early photos and videos of the 3 Skypephone S2 on the UK blog on Tuesday, but thought it was time to share some more of what we’ve seen around the blogosphere.
The combination of free calls and cheap high speed internet access (using the handset’s HSDPA modem capabilities) seems to be [...]

The decision to retire Skypecasts wasn’t an easy one to make, and I understand that many of our long-time Skypecast users will be upset. However, the reason for retiring them is this – we want to focus on making Skype software for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile phones truly great, and so unfortunately we have [...]

At Skype, our aim is to offer products that delight people and enable the world’s conversations. Part of our vision means coming up with new ways for our community of more than 338 million registered users to stay in touch.
Skypecasts is one of the many features that we’ve developed to enable these conversations. What we’ve [...]

Peter Parkes is reporting on big news on the availability of the new 3 Skypephone in the Skype blog.
While in the United Kingdom recently, I not only got to meet with Peter, but also tried out the earlier version of the an earlier version of the 3 Skypephone.
Sadly, this phone is not available in the [...]

Although it hasn't exactly been kept a secret, we're all very excited to announce that the new 3 Skypephone is here. It's called the S2, and as with the first 3 Skypephone, Skype is fully integrated, so you can make and calls and send instant messages to Skype users anywhere in the world absolutely [...]

When we launched our subscriptions back in April, we had always planned to increase the number of countries included. And today, we’re happy to announce the first two new members of our unlimited calling club: Finland and Israel (finishing 22nd and 9th respectively in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest).
This is great news for existing [...]

Hi all,
A few weeks ago we updated the the 4.0 Beta 1 build with some necessary bug fixes. Today we’re updating the build again with some more bug fixes, in particular to video calling, where some of you have reported problems when making calls to older versions of Skype.
There’s no real functional change in these [...]

OK, so first we had laughing, and now dancing: (thanks to Phil for the link)

There are quite a few Skype emoticons, and we’re having a debate in the office about which would make the best videos. Take your pick
p.s. According to our friends at TameBay, there’s another video in the works — we’ll [...]

Today, Skype’s President Josh Silverman picks a lesson from Communist-era dissident communication that is equally relevant to companies that seek to become – or remain — innovative. In fact, there’s even an connection to the recently-introduced beta version of Skype 4.0 for Windows as well (which, for the traditionalists among us, will also have a [...]

Scott Durchslag joined Skype last week (June 30) as chief operating officer, reporting to President, Josh Silverman. I caught up with him Monday while he was in Luxembourg for a meeting of Skype’s leadership.
I first met Scott a few years ago when he was an executive at Motorola, the mobile phone pioneer based in [...]