Hiding Contacts in Skype

As a further aid to organizing your contacts list, you can shorten it by choosing to hide users who are offline, or users who are not sharing their contact details with you, or both kinds of users. To hide contacts, go to Skype: View: Hide Contacts That Are, and put a check mark against Offline or Not Sharing Details. This is a simple, quick, and effective way to trim the length of your contacts list.

Managing Group Contacts in Skype

You can group your contacts lists into various categories only if you have enabled Show Contact Groups. To enable contact grouping, go to Skype: View and put a check mark against Show Contact Groups. Contact grouping adds a group-management bar to the top of the panel displayed when you click on the Contacts tab, as shown in the following figure.
Using the contact groups bar you can create new groups and selectively display groups of contacts in your contacts list. To create a new group click on the small round button with a “+” on it, and to selectively display groups simply click on the small round button with a “>>“ on it; both buttons can be found on the far right of the contact groups bar. In the case of the previous figure, groups named “People and Friends” and “Skype Testing” are used. However, you are free to choose how many groups you want, and how they are named.
In addition to filtering and organizing your contacts list, another useful feature of contact groups is that you can carry out group actions on them. By selecting a group and right-clicking on it, you can then use the popup menu that appears to carry out actions for all the contacts in that group: Start Conference Call, Start Group Chat, Send File to Group, Send Contacts to Group, and Send Group which sends only those contacts in that group to a list of named Skype users. Also, using this popup menu, you can Rename and Remove existing groups. In short, contact groups are a great way to organize your contacts list and to carry out actions for a group that would otherwise be tedious and cumbersome.

Removing contacts in Skype

To remove an entry from your contacts list, right-click on that entry, and from the popup menu that appears choose Remove From Contacts. It’s as simple as that!

How to Get a Refund from Skype?

You can cancel SkypeOut, SkypeIn, or Skype Voicemail at any time and get a refund. Here’s what you do for each service:

􀁕 SkypeOut: If you have spent less than 1 ($1.20) of your last subscription payment, Skype will refund the whole amount of that payment. If you spent more than 1 , Skype will refund only the remaining balance.
􀁕 SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail: If you ask for a refund within
30 days of your last subscription payment, Skype will refund the whole amount of that payment. After more than 30 days, Skype will refund only the amount remaining for your subscription on a pro-rata basis.
Refunds take five to seven business days to appear on your online financial statements.
You can’t get a refund for Skype Zones, but there’s no long-term contract or exit fee either!

Canceling Skype Service

To cancel SkypeOut, SkypeIn, or Skype Voicemail service, you need simply submit a support request. Go to support.skype.com and click on the link Submit Support Request.
To cancel Skype Zones service, e-mail zonessupport@skype.net or call Boingo at 1-866-526-4646 (1-310-460-3906 outside the United States) at least five days before your next billing date.

Money Saving Advices on Skype

In addition to reducing the per-minute cost of your calls and reducing or eliminating fixed charges and taxes, there are other money-saving strategies you can employ by using Skype. I’ll skip the fatuous advice, such as “make fewer calls,” or “use e-mail instead,” because this chapter is about saving money by using Skype, or alternatives to Skype. Though I must say, “make fewer calls” has worked wonders in my family, and was accompanied by a family-wide sigh of relief!

Remember that you can call anyone who uses Skype for free. That means that if you convince people you call frequently, such as family members, friends, and even business contacts, to join Skype, you could save a lot of money. For example, suppose you spent $50 last year speaking to Uncle Tom on a land line. This year, however, you both decide to join Skype. That means you’ll save $50 this coming year, and each and every year beyond that. Indeed, you needn’t watch the clock any longer, and so can speak with Uncle Tom more often and for longer. In short, the more people you convert to Skype, the more money you will save.

Using Skype, you can even reduce the regular phone bills of others. You can do this by subscribing to one or more SkypeIn numbers.

How you do this is best illustrated using an example. Suppose you live in Baltimore, but have a lot of friends and family in London, England. By choosing a London number for SkypeIn, those same friends and family can call you in Baltimore for the cost of a local call—instead of an international call. Indeed, you can have several dial-in numbers (up to 10) dotted around the globe. Friends and family anywhere can then call what is a local number for them at their local rate (sometimes for free), and these calls will then be routed for free (courtesy of the Skype P2P network) to wherever you happen to be signed in to Skype. This way, friends and family can save money by calling your SkypeIn numbers at their local rates, while you can receive such calls anywhere on the planet!

Of course, this strategy will save money for others but not for you, as you will have to pay to subscribe to SkypeIn numbers. But think of all the goodwill it will buy you!

Saving on Taxes and Fixed Charge

The only really meaningful way to attack your fixed charges and taxes is to eliminate one or more phone lines. For example, suppose you have two telephone lines, and your monthly fixed charges and taxes are $50. If you eliminate one telephone line and replace the other with Skype, you will save about $25 a month on fixed costs alone.
The bottom line is this: you can’t start attacking fixed charges and taxes unless you can shed phone lines. If you are able to eliminate one or more lines, sum all the monthly fixed charges and taxes on your phone bill, and then divide that sum by the number of phone lines you have. This will give you the fixed charges and taxes per phone line per month. For each phone line you can eliminate, you will save about that much money, every month.

Determining Saving on Cost of Skype Calls

Look at your most recent phone bill, or bills, as maybe you have both a regular phone and mobile phone. Or better yet, if you still have them, gather several months’ worth of bills. From your itemized list of calls, pick out the 10 most expensive calls.
Now go to the Skype Dialing Wizard at www.skype.com/products/ skypeout/rates/dialing.html, and for each call you have chosen, enter the telephone number and note down the per-minute call rate that the Skype Dialing Wizard gives you. An example of how to get the per minute call rate for a specific number, using the Skype Dialing Wizard, is as shown in the following figure.
Next, round the call duration of each of your chosen calls so that they’re expressed in whole minutes. For example, round a 45-second call up to 1 minute, and round a 5-minute, 25-second call up to 6 minutes. Now multiply these whole-minute call durations by the corresponding SkypeOut call rates you obtained from the Skype Dialing Wizard. Compare these totals with the actual cost of each of the calls on your phone bill. If your calculated numbers are less than your actual numbers from your phone bill, you would have saved money using Skype. And, provided your calling habits don’t change much, you will most likely save money if you use Skype in the future. It’s as simple as that. Keep in mind that there’s no concept of local, long distance, interstate, or international calling in Skype. All call rates are global rates, in the sense that a SkypeOut call rate for a particular destination is good when dialing from anywhere on the planet. If you make a lot of local, toll-free calls—calls that are not itemized on your regular phone bill—then making these calls using Skype will cost you money. Toll-free local calls become toll calls when dialed from Skype. This should be factored into your cost-saving calculations. To estimate your cost of local calls if you were to fully switch to Skype, estimate your monthly minutes of local calling and multiply that number by the SkypeOut rate for your locality (country code plus area code). There’s nothing stopping you from keeping a regular phone for local calls and switching only your long distance and international calls to Skype.

Connecting Skype Access Point

Once you’ve located an access point, it’s time to connect to Skype Zones. First, make sure you are running the Skype Zones client program (Start: All Programs: Skype Zones: Skype Zones). When you run
Skype Zones and are in range of a Skype Zones access point, a window should pop up that invites you to sign in to the Skype Zones network. Alternatively, you can open the Skype Zones client (right-click on the Skype Zones icon in the Windows system tray and choose Open Skype Zones), and then click on the link Available Signals.
This should display the Available Wireless Networks page in the Skype Zones client. To connect to a specific access point, simply click on the blue Connect button opposite the desired wireless network name. To disconnect, just click on the green Connected button. If the wireless access point is part of the Skype Zones network, you will be prompted to sign in when you connect. Once connected, your online status in the Skype softphone will change to Online and you can start using Skype as you would from any regular Internet connection.

Skype Conference Call

The more adventurous reader might want to quickly test some of the other features of Skype: conference calling, chat, and file transfer. To do that, you’ll need to have a handful of people setup in your contacts list. So get the Skype names of some friends (or use the Skype search feature [Skype: Contacts: Search for Skype Users …]) to populate your contacts list, and then try the following quick experiments. They’ll take only a few minutes and will be time well spent.
To make a conference call with Skype, select two or more people in your contacts list by holding down the Control key on your keyboard while clicking on the names with your mouse. Next, click on the Conference Call button on the toolbar, and the conference call should start in its own call tab.
To start a chat session with someone, click on their name in your contacts list and then click on the Chat button on the toolbar This opens Skype’s chat window and starts a chat session. To start a multi-chat session, just highlight more than one name in your contacts list (by holding down the Control key on your keyboard while clicking on their names with your mouse) and click on the Chat button.
Finally, try sending a file to someone. Click on a name in your contacts list and then click the Send File button on the toolbar. This opens a window which you can use to navigate to, and select, the file you want to send. Pick a file —any file—and click on the Open button. This initiates a file transfer. You can send a file to more than one person at the same time by selecting multiple names in your contact list before clicking on the Send File button.

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.