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The most interesting latest news on the topic: Skype |
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Microsoft's Windows Phone Mango OS is reportedly set to include Skype video calling services, which may make it more attractive to potential buyers. When Acer, HTC, Huawei, LG, Samsung and ZTE all unveil their Windows phones this fall, they may include a Skype calling feature, since Microsoft recently bought the company for $8.5 billion. An attendee at Microsoft's Tech Ed conference in New Zealand confirmed Windows Phones are set to include front-facing cameras as well, which are necessary to support Skype video calls, adding further credence to the report. The same source reported Microsoft also tweaked its OS to enable mobile hotspot and Wi-Fi connections, which will allow users to connect laptops, tablet and other devices to the Internet via their phones. However, it appears this function currently drains battery life significantly enough to warrant concern. Microsoft is keeping mum about any improvements, stating, "There is a lot to be excited about and we look forward to sharing more information soon." With these reported developments, Microsoft demonstrates its commitment to improving its mobile OS. When it first debuted, critics attacked its lack of multitasking, copy-and-paste, voice-to-text and HTML 5 support. But the tech giant eventually fixed these shortcomings, which, along with today's news, suggests it may continue to do the same in the future. The company is still playing catch-up in the mobile field, while competitors Google and Apple are hitting home runs with their app-centric, touchscreen devices. The iPhone and various Android handsets claim nearly two-thirds of the market, leaving Microsoft with a paltry sliver alongside floundering RIM and Nokia. Microsoft earlier failed to get in on the game, but now seeks to make up for lost time by launching its new OS this fall. The search giant is partnering with Nokia to put its new mobile software on the Finnish device maker's phones, hoping to reach a wider, global audience, especially in Asian and African countries. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is also including XBox features on Mango, hoping to appeal to gamers who are beginning to ditch their consoles for smartphones. Microsoft's Skype purchase, along with other updated features like a front-facing camera, mobile hotspot and even XBox capabilities, may well give it the edge it needs to compete in an increasingly cutthroat market. |
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Skype is acquiring startup GroupMe, in a move to bring group messaging to smartphones and other mobile devices. GroupMe's technology enables users to text and make conference calls with circles of friends or colleagues. Skype purchased the New York-based company for around $80 million, according to one person familiar with the matter, and the deal is expected to close today. Skype itself is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, which will likely help the communication service integrate its apps and functionality deep within the Windows framework. The deal comes as competition begins to mount in mobile group messaging, with heavyweights like Apple, Google, and Facebook rolling out new smartphone messaging services that include group messaging. Apple is set to launch iMessage, which will allow its users instant messaging-style communication. Google's social network features group video chats as part of its Hangouts feature and Facebook recently launched a rare standalone app that lets users send messages on mobile devices without incurring carrier charges. Companies moving further into mobile messaging are also taking on carrier-based texting and services like Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry Messenger app. As computing shifts from desktop PCs to smartphones and tablets, mobile communications services have become increasingly important for technology companies. The GroupMe acquisition is Skype's effort to keep itself in the game, especially as OS makers themselves move into mobile communication software. "We think the mobile group messaging space is very important," said Skype chief executive Tony Bates. "It means furthering the breaking down of barriers to global communications." Adding group messaging functionality with its GroupMe purchase is likely Skype's bid to keep its sizable subscriber base, especially as other services enter the field. While Skype has a mobile app, its presence on smartphones and tablets is still nascent, and many regard the service as a desktop app. However, the Luxembourg-based company, founded in 2003, has been ramping up its acquisitions and adding features. Now looking to reach people on multiple platforms, Skype recently introduced group video and also bought Qik, a mobile video provider. The GroupMe acquisition will likely help Skype create a new mobile experience to engage its base, but whether or not it can compete as more companies begin to compete remains to be seen. Companies like Apple, Google and RIM can integrate their services deeply into platforms, which are also widely used in the mobile space. While Skype itself will likely play a key part in the Windows Phone experience after Microsoft buys it, the software giant's mobile OS itself hasn't yet found a wide user base. Skype's base is large, but with other apps and platforms competing, consumers' attention and engagement may wander. Adding group messaging may keep Skype competitive, but the company may need to innovate even further to maintain an edge or risk being left behind in a fast-moving, increasingly competitive market. |
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Wireless carriers turning to tiered data plans may soon see less traffic than expected on their networks if consumers keep using the numerous free communications apps available to them. AT&T and Verizon have both switched to tiered data plans that charge more for overages, which would find customers paying more when they use large amounts of data. Under the tiered plans, AT&T and Verizon charge extra if users go beyond their plan's allowed data usage. T-Mobile offers unlimited data, but throttles the service after certain points, leaving Sprint as the only major phone provider with unlimited contract service. As a result of wanting to avoid data overages, consumers increasingly turn to apps that allow them to use many of their smartphones' features for free. A recent Nielsen report showed Americans consume twice the data from last year, and that data is increasingly driven by apps. While free apps are bad for carriers, they're nice for tech companies. Programs that save users money on their wireless bills can mean big money for companies like Microsoft, which recently bought Skype for $8.5 billion, Microsoft's largest deal to date. The purchase may have been made as part of an effort to attract smartphone users to Windows-based phones. Since callers can use Skype for free videoconferencing on Windows phones if they are in a Wi-Fi zone, it can save them from using up the space on a data plan. Other apps let smartphone owners text without paying for traditional texting plans, which could result in less revenue for carriers if people decide they no longer want to pay for texting packages. For example, this fall, Apple plans to release iMessage, which will allow iOS users to send texts, photos, video and contact information to other iOS users all in one messaging window for free. Google is rumored to be developing a similar messaging system for its Droid line. As the tech market continues to change and smartphone users become savvier, they may well continue to find even more ways to use their phones for free while enjoying all their capabilities. As that happens, wireless companies may look for new ways to keep customers on their networks and away from the free services. |
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Facebook today announced a partnership with Skype to bring video chat to its 750 million users, taking another step at solidifying its title as social network champion. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Skype CEO Tony Bates, which announced the partnership from Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., said the service, along with group text chat and a new chat design, will be available later today. "We've been busy building stuff for the past six months or so," Zuckerberg said. "Today marks the beginning of what we'll call Launching Season 2011." The video service will run directly through Facebook chat rather than the dedicated Skype application. After users have downloaded the video plug-in, which according to Facebook engineers takes about 10 to 30 seconds, people can chat with friends instantly. The service will only support one-on-one video chatting at launch, but neither CEO ruled out group video coming in the coming months. Mobile Facebook users do not have access to the service yet, as it will only be made available on computers. The partnership now makes Facebook one of the largest video conferencing services in the world, and helps Skype get closer to its goal of reaching one billion users worldwide. "It's really gratifying to see the product and for us to actually have this now available on the leading social network out there," said Bates. Bates said Skype currently sees 300 million minutes of video chatting each month, with over half of the site's traffic being video conferencing. Bates also said these numbers will increase with the Facebook partnership. Both Zuckerberg and Bates side-stepped a question about the terms of the agreement, though Bates said Skype is looking at paid services through Facebook, possibly using Facebook credits, the network's currency, as a way to increase profits. The integration of Skype to Facebook will allow new users to try the service and video chat with friends and family, especially older users who cannot run applications outside of Facebook and other websites. With the service available through an already familiar service like Facebook, there's no reason users won't try video calling. In addition to video chatting, Facebook also announced group text chat and a new chat design to make the instant messaging experience better for its hundreds of millions of users. Group chatting allows users to open a chat with one friend and invite several others into the same box, eliminating the need to have several chats open with the same friends talking about the same topic. The new chat design will streamline the process of finding which friends are online and available to chat. The new design allows users who have larger screens the ability to run Facebook and have a pop-out buddy list similar to AOL Instant Messenger. These new additions improve an already strong Facebook experience as the company could face its biggest competition to date with Google's Google+ service. Adding strong chat features as well as video calling turns Facebook into a one-stop media and communications destination for social network users, and could potentially not give any a reason to join a second social network, especially one which doesn't offer the same plethora of features found in Facebook. Facebook's partnership with Skype to bring video conference to users will go a long way in securing it as the top dog in the social network yard. Skype's desire to join the network shows companies understand the importance of social media. |
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Skype today introduced video calling for Android, in an app that positions the chat service as a de facto standard across mobile platforms. The new feature lets select Android phones make video calls over Wi-Fi and cellular connections to other devices, including iPhones, PCs, Macs and other Skype-enabled products. As more Android phones are supported, Skype may find itself the go-to solution for VoIP and video calls across mobile platforms. Apple's FaceTime service, for example, only works with iOS devices and Mac computers. Skype, which had average of 145 million users a month, now connects all the major platforms. That's good news for Microsoft, which bought Skype in May to presumably integrate it into its Windows Phone platform. The more entrenched Skype is, the more useful the functionality will be. Skype users made around 207 billion minutes of calls last year, with 42 percent of them being video calls. The lion's share of that time would have been desktop-to-desktop calls, but VoIP is quickly gaining momentum in the mobile sphere, driven by the uptake of smartphones. Faster networks and increasingly common front-facing cameras also make quality video calling possible. The biggest hurdle to mobile VoIP, once carriers, saw Skype as a threat to their lucrative voice business -- if people can make free calls over a data connection, voice minutes are an afterthought. But recently there have been signs that carriers are relaxing that stance: Skype announced a deal with Verizon to allow Skype calling on the company's LTE 4G network. A similar agreement with AT&T is said to be in the works. The first Android phones to support Skype video calling are the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo and Pro and Google Nexus S. |
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A British professor has turned a traditional red British phone booth into a 21st century video conference stall, as new-school technology gets an old school feel. Professor Michael Shaughnessy of Language Resource Center at the Washington & Jefferson College removed the telephone from his retro phone booth, replacing it with a trendy iPad 2 tablet. The iPad comes equipped with Skype, allowing booth visitors to make video conference calls inside the red wooden stall. Shaughnessy latched the iPad against the wall of the booth and installed Skype and a "World Unlimited Account" on the tablet so his students could call their friends and families in their home countries. "I had a blast converting it," Shaughnessy said. "It serves a good function as our students use our international unlimited account a lot to call home, and now they have a bit more privacy." People enjoy the nostalgia they get from seeing old products, but may not be able to live without today's luxuries. Luckily, there a several products on the market to allow users to get the old-school feel out of their new-school products. In April, South Korea-based Kee Utility released an iPhone desk dock that transforms an iPhone into a traditional wired desk phone. The accessory has built-in stereo speakers, a microphone, a volume control, instant mute and works off USB or AC power. The company has described the dock as a blend of "Mad Men" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." People use their smartphones to capture pictures more than ever, and there's also an app allowing users to get a retro 80s feel out of their digital images. Hipstamatic processes iPhone photos so that they look like they were taken with an old toy camera from decades past. The company even offers the "HipstaCase" to give the iPhone the look and feel of an old toy camera from the 80s. The further away society moves from the "old days," it appears the more it wants them back. Luckily, there are people and companies who are blending the old-and-new schools together as one. |
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More people are using Internet services like Skype to make phone calls, suggesting that voice calls will be increasingly integrated into apps rather than a separate service.
About a quarter of American adults have now made calls using Voice-over-IP, or VoIP, services like Skype and Vonage, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. On any given day 5 percent of respondents have placed Internet calls.
These numbers show a dramatic uptick from a similar survey Pew conducted in 2007, when only 8 percent of respondents had made calls online and 2 percent did so on any given day.
"It's part of a longer term process where people are moving away from land line telephones to cell phones or Internet phones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, to the WTOP radio station.
The research suggests that voice calls will increasingly flow through computing devices, both fixed and mobile, where they can be linked to social networking and other types of communications people routinely carry out on smartphones and PCs.
For example, if a friend tweets something funny, a user might be able to call that person directly from the tweet rather than switching to an entirely different modality.
Facebook, for example, now supports calls, bringing the voice channel directly into the social networking interface.
The survey data will be welcomed by Microsoft, which recently spent a hefty $8.5 billion to acquire Skype, presumably with the intent of integrating the service into future versions of its PC and mobile operating systems.
Although more people probably think of Skype as a desktop app rather than something to install on a smartphone, Microsoft may find it even more important for its Windows Phone platform, which doesn't have an integrated VoIP option. That will be increasingly sought after, especially as better 4G connectivity makes both voice and video calls more practical.
It's even possible that increased awareness of VoIP on smartphones is feeding into the uptick in usage that Pew reports.
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Microsoft has agreed to buy Skype for $8.5 billion, in a deal that could form a cornerstone of the software giant's strategy to jumpstart its struggling Windows Phone platform.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Redmond, Wash.-based company, which already offers Lync, an integrated voice and messaging application, would gain Skype's 124 million active users, catapulting it into the voice-over-IP, or VoIP, market.
Skype may be most relevant to Microsoft's mobile push. Windows Phone doesn't have an Internet calling app, and VoIP is quickly becoming a key feature for smartphones, especially as better 4G connectivity makes both voice and video calls more practical.
Tight Skype integration could help the beleaguered Windows platform gain momentum, after a lackluster debut. In February, Microsoft inked a deal with Nokia to develop phones based on its Windows software. The new devices, which is expected to begin trickling in at at the beginning of 2012, will give Microsoft the distribution power to push its platfrom around the world.
Research firm IDC predict that Microsoft could overtake Apple and become the number-two smartphone platform by 2015.
But Microsoft may have had to worry about alienating critical carrier partners by embracing mobile VoIP, which would let users bypass cellular per-minute charges. But wireless operators have started to embrace Internet calling.
Earlier this year, Skype announced an agreement with Verizon to bring the app to the carrier's 4G LTE network, and a deal with AT&T is also reportedly in the works.
With sagging PC sales threatening Microsoft's bread-and-butter Windows business, the company is eager to establish itself in mobile. Skype could boost the trending collaborative element of the enterprise software, helping fend off competitors Google and Cisco.
The agreement was approved by the boards of Microsoft and Skype and is subject to regulatory approvals. Just last week, Google and Facebook were reportedly competing for Skype. The deal is Microsoft biggest acquisition in its history, and possibly its most important.
Skype will become a new group, called "Skype Division," within Microsoft, people familiar with the matter say, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will lead the new unit and report directly to Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer.
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Facebook and Google are reportedly in a bidding war for Skype, which could create a communications powerhouse.
Two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions told Reuters that Skype is considering a possible purchase or joint venture between Facebook or Google. Skype, which uses voice-over-IP, or VoIP, to stream live video and audio calls, boasted 124 million users this last month alone and stands to gain even more should it agree to either deal.
Should Skype join with Google, it gains solid backing from a deep-pocketed protector. Google, meanwhile, would gain a vast improvement over its current chat client.
Skype is doing fine on its own, raising over $860 million in 2010, but a partnership with Google would help the company go public with a bang, eclipsing others recent IPOs like LinkedIn's offering, an important boost for Skype as more and more tech companies flood the market.
Skype's video chat and desktop client would help Google compete against other tech companies. Google Talk does not support video chat like Skype, making it inferior to rival Microsoft's online collaboration suite Lync. Furthermore, Google's services are all online while Skype has a desktop app; if the two companies can combine these interfaces users will find it much easier and faster to communicate than ever before.
Should Skype hook up with Facebook, it would inherit the social network's reach, over 600 million users, and increase the flow of calls across its network. Skype would also reportedly earn between $3 to 4 billion if Facebook decided to bid for its loyalty. And the transition would be easy, as Skype users can already call their Facebook friends from the Skype desktop application; any partnership would likely make voice and video calls possible from inside Facebook as well.
Facebook would be happy to buy Skype, sources say, as CEO Mark Zuckerburg is reportedly interested in extending its reach to voice and video calls to draw people to spend even more time chatting on the site.
Insiders say a tie-up between Facebook and Skype would make more sense than one with Google, which already has Google Voice. Still, given their rivalry, it's possible Google and Facebook are simply competing to prevent the other from winning a valuable asset in Skype.
Skype and Google declined to comment. Facebook was not immediately available to comment.
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Skype is coming to boardroom video conferencing, thanks to Logitech's LifeSize Passport, suggesting the growing importance of video chat in the corporate world.
The Passport lets companies stage video conferences that far outstrip the typical desktop video chat experience. But Skype users can now join a LifeSize conference, opening the door for people in the field or at remote offices where they may not have a LifeSize setup to participate.
The only catch is that all video in the conference drops in quality to VGA, down from 720p HD.
"We've been working closely with Skype over the last two years, helping us deliver on our shared vision to make video communication truly accessible to anyone, anywhere," said Craig Malloy, LifeSize's chief executive.
Video conferencing started out for business meetings, but the technology eventually found greater success on the consumer level. Now, full circle, high-quality video conferencing is affordable and practical for business use, and integrating consumer-grade Skype makes systems more flexible.
Improvements in video conferencing, with forward-facing cameras and speedier Internet, are helping businesses cut down on travel and conduct business remotely.
Besides Skype, Facebook has joined the video chatting bandwagon with Facebook Messenger. Google also introduced free video calling, suggesting that the future will see a higher usage of video conferencing services than ever before.
Skype saw 27 million people sign on in one day this January.
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