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| 1 |  AP - Skype SA, the Internet calling service that was controlled until last year by eBay Inc., filed Monday for a U.S. initial public offering. Yahoo! News: Internet News » | | 2 |  AP - The company behind the magicJack, the Internet phone gadget heavily advertised on television, has another trick up its sleeve: free phone calls from computers, smart phones and iPads. Yahoo! News: Personal Technology » | | 3 |  | | 4 |  | | 5 |  Mashable - Skype just made it easier to save money on international calls. Users can now directly call any phone in the world from a cellphone or landline, and that phone will ring immediately, with no pesky voice-prompt hoops to jump through. Yahoo! News: Personal Technology » | | 6 | The ones who created Bridg.me did it because they found conference calling far too complicated to actually be as productive as it should be. They devised this application as a way to connect the different people that are to be involved in any conference, with a minimum of hassle and inconvenience for everybody. Read more Learn more about Bridg.me in Dataopedia.com Find out how much Bridg.me is worth with Stimator.com killerstartups.com » | | 7 | In buying Skype, Microsoft is getting one of the rare companies that has turned its name into a verb, like Xerox or Google. "Let's Skype" is a phrase understandable, with slight translation, in much of the world.
For most people, it means sitting in front of your computer to talk, often for free. Four out of ten times, there are cameras involved too, turning the session into a video chat.
The service has become popular for long, rambling chats with distant friends and relatives. Children too young to talk on the phone can still be entranced by the image of Grandma on the computer screen.
"Skype really is that inner circle, that inner set of social experiences," CEO Tony Bates said Tuesday.
Skype bypasses the traditional phone system by routing calls and video over the Internet, just like email and Web pages. The calls vault effortlessly over national borders, ignoring the fences that phone companies put up in the form of international calling charges. Usernames take the place of phone numbers.
Calling from computer to computer is free. Skype charges for calls to phone numbers on the traditional phone network. It also charges for getting a phone number associated with your Skype username, so people can call you from regular phones.
Skype wasn't the first to offer phone calls over the Internet when it launched in 2003, but the way it did it was unique and rebellious. It relied on a technology that had already disrupted the music industry -- peer-to-peer file sharing, in which computers connect to share things directly, without an intermediary vulnerable to legal action.
The founders, Niklas Zennstrom, a Swede, and Janus Friis, a Dane, had run a peer-to-peer file-sharing network called Kazaa. They sold it to an Australian company in 2002 after coming under intense legal pressure from the entertainment industry, which... newsfactor.com » | | 8 |  LONDON (Reuters) - Skype, which is being bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, introduced a new service on Thursday allowing users of Android phones to make free video calls to Skype contacts, including those on Apple iPhones.
Reuters: Internet News » | | 9 |  Mashable - Google has expanded the scope of Gmail's phone calling feature, reducing the cost of international phone calls and making the feature available in 38 languages.
The product, which is powered by Google Voice, will be rolling out across the world in the next few days. A green phone icon will appear in a user's Gmail account once the voice calling feature is available in his or her country. The search giant introduced voice calling in Gmail last August. Yahoo! News: Internet News » | | 10 | SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The newest version of Apple Inc's popular iPhone has already hit the Chinese market -- the fake market that is.
Reuters: Internet News » | | 11 | Video calling on computers, mobile phones and tablets is no longer the novelty it was even a few years ago. But such calls remain a rarity on your television. Never mind that some newer, connected smart TVs provide video-calling options. Or that in recent years companies such as Cisco and Logitech have introduced set-top options for turning your living room TV into a gigantic video phone. Video calls on the TV have barely registered with consumers. Too expensive. Not good enough. Some combination of the two.
Even so, I've always appreciated the idea behind using the TV for video calls. The screen on your TV is likely the largest and best display in your house. And consider how appealing it might be for the entire family to congregate in front of a camera to show off the newborn to out-of-town relatives, rather than having everyone try to crowd in front of a PC's webcam.
Enter Silicon Valley newcomer Tely Labs. With its compact TelyHD Skype-compatible set-top box that recently went on sale, the company believes it can succeed where others have failed. Inside the nearly a foot-long black box is a wide-angle high-definition camera, four noise-canceling microphones, a pretty powerful dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and Android software. In other words, it has the guts of a computer, which suggests some interesting possibilities down the road.
For now, though, this is mostly about video calling via Skype. In my tests, TelyHD delivered generally acceptable but uneven video quality, even after I swapped one test unit for another. The box is capable of delivering high-definition video up to the 720p standard, though I certainly never mistook the pictures I saw for a supercrisp HD series on network television. You need a robust Internet connection of at least 1 Mbps (upstream and downstream) to achieve... newsfactor.com » | | 12 | Cisco is battling against Microsoft's $8.5 billion Skype acquisition in the European Union's high court. Rather than trying to kill the acquisition itself, Cisco just wants to make sure Microsoft won't block other video conferencing services from interfacing with the platform.
Marthin De Beer, head of Cisco's video conferencing division, noted that the world remains some distance from the goal of video calls being as easy and ubiquitous as phone calls are today. He asked his blog readers to imagine how difficult it would be if they were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if their phone could only call certain brands.
"Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission's approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union," De Beer said. Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, joined Cisco in the appeal.
Insisting on Interoperability
De Beer was quick to mention that Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would guarantee standards-based interoperability so that no single company can control the future of video communications.
"This appeal is about one thing only: securing standards-based interoperability in the video calling space," De Beer said. "Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as e-mail is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can't make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike."
Cisco is calling for open standards in a move to accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment and services. This is critical, De Beer noted, because the world will be home to nearly 3 billion Internet users... newsfactor.com » |
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