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Skype Blogs

Blog about the latest Skype news, written from the perspective of the people who work at Skype.

Lech Wałęsa speaks about Skype and Solidarity for the futureNovember 25

If you’re reading this in an RSS feed you can watch the video on Dailymotion.

It was two o’clock in the morning of October 5, 1983 when Lech and Danuta Wałęsa were awakened from a deep sleep by the telephone ringing. It was Krzysztof Wyszkowski on the line; he sounded overjoyed: “Lech! You’ve won the Nobel Prize!” “Yeah, yeah...” Lech growled, still half asleep, and then put the receiver back.

Lech Wałęsa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for his role in establishing the Solidarność movement, is a force to be reckoned with. By 1983, he had been frequently detained for his work with trade unions, in particular his co-ordination of the Gdańsk shipyard strike in 1980.

However, his work paid off, and the Solidarność movement was able to overthrow the totalitarian regime and eventually establish

Home ImprovementNovember 20

As you probably know, Skype’s largest office is in Tallinn, Estonia. Whenever I visit, just before touching down at Tallinn airport, the plane passes Lake Ülemiste – home of the Ülemiste Elder, a mythological character who innocently asks passers-by whether the growing city has been completed. Apparently, the correct response is, “Not yet.” Imply the opposite, the legend goes, and the grumpy Elder will flood the city.

Skype, too, remains a work in progress. We’re a dynamic, fast-growing company that learns from a changing world and adjusts accordingly. For us to continue thriving, change cannot be a one-time thing. It has to be a way of life. Stagnation, the dismal alternative, requires no effort and creeps up silently. People tend to get stuck in their ways and companies are no different. When they get bigger, they get clumsier.

I’d rather avoid that last bit. So, in August we began evaluating our structure to make sure, really sure, that we don’t join the Clumsy Club.

Now, 2008 has been a very good year for us. Our growth rate has been terrific and I’m cautiously optimistic about healthy growth in 2009 as well. Obviously, anyone claiming to have a reliable crystal ball is either a fool or a gambler. We’re neither. So we cannot fully predict how much additional business will be heading our way because of the recession. As a five-year-old company, we simply haven’t lived through a downcycle before. But in difficult times, peopl

Skype and net neutralityNovember 19

Jonathan Christensen is Skype’s General Manager for Video and Audio.

Today, I’m speaking on a panel at the Open Mobile Summit, talking about ‘disruptive voice’. We’ll explore both the business and technology sides of communications innovation, and one thing I’ll raise is the issue of net neutrality. Tomorrow, my colleague Christopher Libertelli, who leads our Government Relations team in the Americas, will be speaking on a similar panel in Ottawa for the Public Policy Forum.

Some of you may be aware of our ‘wireless Carterphone’ petition to the FCC in the US (PDF). It demands that the regulatory body allow people to use any mobile device on any mobile network, free of restrictions imposed by cellphone networks. This is critically important to the future of mobile communications – without this freedom, competition will be stifled, and mobile device and connectivity prices will remain high.

More broadly, Skype supports the idea of

Xobni and Skype integration now even betterNovember 19

Good news for those of you who use Xobni - the new version of the sidebar improves Skype integration.

For contacts who are Skype users, you can now:

• Send instant messages
• Make Skype-to-Skype calls

And for all contacts, you can:

• Make calls to landlines and mobiles at Skype's low rates
• Send SMSs

- all from the Xobni sidebar.

The sidebar also displays the online status for Skype contacts, and even if you're not a Skype user yourself, you'll be able to see whether or not your contacts are.

If you're already a Xobni user, you can upgrade to the latest version now; if you're not, you can download it and try it out. Our friends at

Marhaba! Skype website now available in Arabic · مرحباً! موقع Skype أصبح متاحاً الآن بالعربيةNovember 18

Skype is all about conversation – and we realise that it’s sometimes hard to have a conversation with someone when you don’t speak the same language.

That’s why we try to add new languages to our repertoire when we can, and today we’ve launched an Arabic version of the Skype website. For the hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers across the globe, Skype now speaks the way you do.

Visit the Skype website in Arabic »

إن Skype برنامج للمحادثة - وقد لاحظنا أنه من الصعب أحياناً أن تُجري محادثة مع شخص ما عندما لا تتحدثان نفس اللغة.

ولذلك فإننا نحاول إضافة لغات جديدة إلى مخزوننا عندما نتمكن من ذلك، وقد قمنا اليوم بتدشين النسخة العربية من موقع Skype. من أجل مئات الملايين من المتحدثين باللغة العربية، أصبح Skype يتحدث الآن بلغتكم.

قم بزيارة موقع Skype باللغة العربية »