Skype Ditches Google Toolbar

Just hours after Skype officially became part of Microsoft, comes news that the VoIP provider has removed Google Toolbar from its installer package for Windows.

The release notes for Skype 5.6 confirm the change in an update that also contains “attribution of used third party software” (perhaps another Microsoft-related change) and bug fixes.

Google offers incentives to developers who bundle its toolbar with their products, although now that Skype is part of Microsoft such a deal would be awkward to say the least – and it won’t need the revenue provided from such a deal anyway.

As we reported earlier, Skype will continue to offer its products on multiple, non-Microsoft platforms, while CEO Tony Bates has assumed the title of President of the Skype Division of Microsoft, directly reporting to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Expect Skype to be integrated into Microsoft products in coming months.

Source: The Next Web

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Facebook + Skype= Video chat with 750 million users. Is it finally happening?

Yesterday, we posted that Facebook is about to announce something awesome. Speculation runs high that Facebook will finally release its iPad application, filling a hole which has been desperately wanted by its mobile-loving users. But another consideration is that Facebook is finally partnering with Skype to offer live video chat to its users. Whatever product is released, it has been built by Facebook’s 40-person Seattle team.

And do you know what is near Seattle? Microsoft. And what hasMicrosoft just bought? Skype. And have you heard how chummy Facebook and Microsoft are? While they’ve had their disputes in the past, the two are financially in bed with one another. Facebook’s ties to Microsoft began 2006 when they first signed an advertising deal; the two companies still continue to have an ad partnership powerful enough to make Google shiver. And no small detail: Microsoft has owned 3% of Facebook since it invested $240 million in the social network in 2007.

We reported on the possible Facebook and Skype partnership last September when discussions between the two companies reportedly began. After numerous Skype updates, including an October update that allowed Skype 5.0 users to SMS, chat or call their Facebook friends via Skype right from the News Feed, news remained quiet. That is,until March, when rumors swirled again starting from a report in Bloomberg that Facebook had resumed talks with global VoIP service Skype, a partnership that would offer Web video calls to anyone with a Facebook account within the social media platform.

Tech Crunch’s Mike Arrington has gone so far as to confirm this speculation. He writes: “Next week, says a source with knowledge of the partnership, Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser…The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component.”

Considering the world is quite excited by Google+’s promising Hangout video chat feature, this could be a powerful and timely feature play by Facebook. The “awesome announcement” will take place Wednesday, July 6th at 10AM PST. Stay tuned for further news.

Source: The Next Web

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All About Skype (After a Infographic Research)

Now that Skype has a new home in Microsoft, it’s a good time to look back over the history of the company. After all, with Skype now part of the Microsoft empire, it is going to become even more imperative that we all know as much about the company as possible.

Skype should eventually worm itself deep into the Microsoft world, but that is hardly what looked likely when the company was formed back in 2003. In fact, if you look at the company’s history, its eventual resting place in Redmond can’t appear anything but a bit odd.

Whatever the case, Skype has never been more important than it is right now, so let’s get take a moment and learn about this communication behemoth.

Source: The Next web

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Mozilla To Block Skype’s Browser Toolbar – Skype Responds, Recommends Upgrading

Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that it would be blocking the Skype toolbar add-on in all versions of its Firefox browser.

While this concerns an impending ‘soft block’, meaning users will be able to re-enable the add-on if they choose to do so, Skype is keen to point out users should always install the most recent version of its desktop client in order to avoid compatibility issues.

The VoIP company also says they’re sorry about the problems, and are diligently working with the Mozilla crew to iron out any remaining issues as fast as possible.

The Skype Toolbar for Firefox, which comes bundled with the Skype client, is a browser extension that detects phone numbers in Web pages and re-renders them as clickable buttons, cutting shorter the time it takes for people to call those numbers using the Skype app.

Mozilla claims the current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week alone and could potentially make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower (and thus significantly slow down the rendering of regular Web pages as well).

Skype’s official statement on the matter:

Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and we are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users.

Users can download the latest Skype client with the latest included Toolbars OR the latest toolbar installer itself is here.

Source: Tech Crunch

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Skype Adds Group Video Calling To Enterprise Offering

It’s been a big week for Skype. The companylaunched video chat capability to its iPhone app last week and announced the acquisition of mobile video startup Qik today. The company has made another announcement, launching group calling functionality to its business offering for Windows PCs (the feature had previously been added to its consumer clients for Mac and Windows computers last year).

The new version of Skype for enterprise allows businesses to have video calls with up to 10 concurrent participants, adding to the client’s existing chat, screen sharing and conference call features. Group Video Calling for businesses is available from Skype for $8.99 per user per month.

Group Calling for Skype’s business offering is a big deal when put in the context of Skype’s enterprise ambitions. When the VoIP company filed to go public, Skype publicly stated that it plans on adding enterprise products to its suite to help build additional revenues. Group Video calling is no doubt an incredibly useful feature for businesses.

David Gurlé, General Manager and Vice President of Skype’s Enterprise business unit said in a statement, The Business version of Skype is great for live meetings and it offers a compelling low-cost option compared to competing solutions that are often complicated, costly or difficult to deploy.

Approximately 37 percent of Skype users say they use Skype’s product platform occasionally or often for business-related purposes and Skype is hoping to raise that number as the company looks for new forms of revenue. Gurlé told us last fall that Skype is ramping up production of its enterprise products so I’d expect 2011 to be a big year for Skype’s business strategy.

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Skype Reveals A Bug In Its Windows Client Was What Crashed Its System

After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong.

One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152).

Rabbe kicks off by explaining that a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overheated on Wednesday, December 22.

A number of Skype clients subsequently started receiving delayed responses from said overloaded servers, which weren’t properly processed by the Windows client in question. This ultimately caused the affected version to malfunction.

Initially, users of Skype’s newer and older Windows software, as well as those using the service on Mac, iPhone and their television sets, were unaffected.

Nevertheless, the whole system collapsed as the faulty version of the Windows client, 5.0.0.152, is by far the most popular – Rabbe says 50% of all Skype users globally were running it, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail.

The clients included roughly a third of all publicly available supernodes, which also failed as a result of this issue.

From the blog post:

A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients and establishing connections between them by creating local clusters of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode.

Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the P2P network again. As a result, the P2P network was left with 25–30% fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes.

Rabbe goes on to explain a lot of people who experienced crashing Windows clients started rebooting the software, which caused a huge increase in the load on Skype’s P2P cloud network. He adds that traffic to the supernodes was about 100 times what would normally be expected at the time of day the failure occurred.

A perfect storm in the P2P clouds, so to speak.

To learn how Skype supported the recovery of its supernode network, and what they’ll be doing to prevent this from happening again, I suggest you go read the full blog post.

And major kudos to the company for being so prolific in explaining what happened.

        
        
        
    

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Skype goes down and Twitter goes insane

Breaking: Skype appears to have has gone down. We’re trying to ascertain why and get comment from the company. However, as of this moment Skype is not working for millions of users, and the angst is playing out on Twitter right now.

Of course what’s so funny is that so many of us now use Twitter DM (direct message) and perhaps even Facebook IM as a sort of alternative “Skype-a-like” IM platform that there are now potential alternatives. It looks like for now that Skype has huge issues though – and it’s coming at a delicate time for the company as it tries to forge path independent from former owner eBay.

Update: Skype has posted an update saying:

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