Skype Trivias #1

In October 2005, Skype was acquired by eBay, which also owns PayPal. eBay’s goal is to use Skype to enable its buyers and sellers to communicate more effectively and so reduce the “friction” inherent in buying and selling things. Overall, this is good news for Skype and for Skype users. Not only will eBay’s user base be encouraged to use Skype—significantly adding to the number of people already using the program—it gives Skype the backing of an Internet powerhouse that has lots of marketing and financial muscle.

A brief history on Skype

Skype is not the first P2P software to be made widely available via the Internet and to achieve mainstream status. Indeed, the people who founded Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are the same people who created the P2P file sharing program Kazaa, which is the most downloaded (at 363 million as of September 2004) software In the history of the Internet. Skype clearly has something of a\ pedigree.
Skype was founded in 2002, but the domain names Skype.com and Skype.net weren’t registered until April 2003. August 2003 saw the release of the first public beta, or trial, version of the Skype softphone (often also referred to as the Skype client). In June 2004, Skype introduced its first fee-based service, SkypeOut, which enables Skype users to call regular phone numbers all over the world at very low rates (as low as $0.021 per minute). SkypeIn, which is a fee-based service that allows people to call Skype users from regular phones, debuted in March 2005. Skype continues to add new features and services at a rapid pace.

What SKype can Do?

Skype-to-Skype calls are free, as are video calls, chat, and file transfers. So even without becoming a fee-paying Skype subscriber, you can do an awful lot for free!
Skype’s fee-based subscription services enhance Skype so that you can also make calls to, as well as receive calls from, regular and mobile phones. For additional fees, you can add on voicemail, custom ringtones, and other optional services.
Skype’s phenomenal success, in large part, is due to the rich—and growing—feature set you get simply by installing Skype on your computer. Also, Skype has received a good deal of praise for the simplicity of its user interface and its ease of use, which have done much to contribute to its success. The Skype softphone runs in a small window on your PC, with a graphical interface that is surprisingly easy to navigate given the number of features it supports, as the following figure illustrates. As mentioned previously, you can augment Skype’s basic feature set by subscribing to any of the following fee-based services:

• SkypeOut: Make calls to regular and mobile phones.
• SkypeIn: Receive calls from regular and mobile phones.
• Voicemail: Record voice messages from callers.
• Skype Zones: Use all of Skype’s services while traveling.
• Personalise Skype: Add custom ringtones and pictures to the
• Skype softphone.
• Skype Control Panel: Manage Skype subscription services for a group of Skype users (mostly of interest to business users of Skype).

In contrast to many regular and mobile phone plans, which are typically quite inflexible about what features are included with your service plan, with Skype you only have to pay for those features you want. Plus, Skype doesn’t require you to sign any complex or longterm contracts. That’s right: you can cancel anytime—often receiving a refund for unused services. Try that with your phone company or mobile carrier!

Pamela is polite

It often happens: You are away from your computer and someone sends you a chat message. A polite reply to a single chatter is, “I’m away from my computer. My personal assistant, Pam, is responding with this automated message.” This type of response is good for letting single chatters know that you’re not currently available. But in a multi-chat situation in which many people may be available to chat, this kind of automated reply can be downright rude. Pamela avoids the potential faux pas by discerning the difference between a single chat and a multi-person chat, and behaving the way you want in each situation.

Pamela is very punctual

Skype gives your customers, clients, and associates easy access to you from anywhere around the globe. However, anywhere around the globe can mean that people halfway around the world could try to reach you during the middle of their day — while it happens to be 1 a.m. your time. To help manage your presence and interaction with the broader global community, Pamela has the Time Scheduling function. In this way, Pamela keeps you in touch with others while also making sure that you get your rest.

Pamela is Web savvy

If you can forward email notifications and slip in a sound file, then what’s to stop you from creating an alternate Skype ID, calling Pamela, and having the message sent to some Internet server where it can be blogged or podcasted? Rather than code some geeky stuff such as XML or RSS, you can get the same results with Pamela’s built-in capabilities.
So don’t worry about the geeky stuff. Pamela has specific features that make blogging and PamCasting (Pamela’s version of podcasting) easy.

Pamela knows whom she’s talking to

Want something really cool and way over the top? Try making personalized greetings for any Skype contact. That’s right! You can record a different greeting message for your husband, your boss, your favorite niece, and that annoying neighbor who feels obligated to gossip about everyone on the local school board. Figure 9-16 shows the Personal Options dialog box with Enable Personalized Voice Mail for This User selected (in this example, the user is NewbieSkyper).
If you think that personalization alone is cool, wait until you combine personalization with brains. We discuss call forwarding earlier in this chapter (see the section “Forwarding calls when you can’t answer”). So what happens if NewbieSkyper calls SeasonedSkyper, who has call forwarding turned on, and the call is punted over to TheProfessionalSkyper running Pamela? Happily, Pamela is smart enough to know who is actually doing the calling and applies the personalized greeting for NewbieSkyper.
The personalization feature may be cool, but it is also practical. Suppose you are traveling and have access only to email. During your travels, Pamela may have logged plenty of messages on your home base. But also suppose that you’re expecting a very important message from one of the people calling. Wouldn’t it be nice if recorded audio message files from only that person could be forwarded to your email address? Pamela lets you set up this email notification in either of two ways: without forwarding the audio file, or with the audio file bundled with the notification.