Yes, I have professed my undying love of Skype many times, so just put up with me while I talk about this. Starting Monday, Radio Shack will have Skype kiosks in their stores that will be selling phones and headsets to work with their service. They will also be carrying low end mics and headphones with the Skype software included for easy setup.

Read the article, stop by a Radio Shack, join the cult of Skype!

Found this really interesting. Seems the largest wi-fi “hot spot” is 700 square miles of rural Oregon. Great idea for a test location for something this massive, but as the article states, I think they will have a hard time ever doing something like this in a major city like groups such as Google are trying. I think there will be too many complaints from the likes of SBC and the such, but I don’t care personally, this IS going to happen at some point.

I don’t think for a second that there won’t be some day in the future where I will be able to open up my laptop anywhere I want and log on to the net. Think of how that will change the world. VoIP anytime, anyplace? Instant messages in your car? (not while you are driving hopefully) Just as the internet changed business, this will change things just as much as no one will be locked down to a desk any more. You will also the price of laptops begin dropping radically as more and more people switch to just buying them for the conveniance.

The time is coming folks, and I for one can’t wait.

As I have said many, many times before, I adore Skype. Matter of fact, I would go so far as to say I am in love with it. Today though, I learned that others had eyes for my lover, but they were buying them. This was done by none other than eBay.

eBay came rolling in with a large bankroll and swept up “my girl”. You can read all the gory details in this press release. eBay is paying them $1.3 billion dollars in cash, and another $1.3 billion in stock options for a total of $2.6 billion upfront. Not mentioned in the release, but I found in this news story that eBay will pay another $1.5 billion if Skype reaches it’s projected sales goals.

Ok, here’s what I don’t get. Skype’s sales figures show they will do $60 million this year, and projections of $200 million for 2006. How in the world does a company doing that amount warrant a purchasing price so out of line with it’s projections? Is there some thing I am missing here? eBay does say they will use the Skype software to bring buyers and sellers closer together, and possibly charge sellers a fee for a successful contact. Still, doesn’t seem worth the value to me. If they had a crazy idea about charging for Skype-to-Skype calls, Google Talk and Yahoo Instant Messenger have pretty much killed that by also adding free VoIP to their systems.

This will be interesting to watch, because for now, I think eBay WAY over paid

Google Talk is here…like we don’t all have enough instant messaging programs already. Between Skype, YIM, AIM, MSN and now Google, we are all going to need another 256 megs of RAM just to run all these IM programs!

Google Chat does includ VoIP though, so may be promising. If you would like to test Google with me, leave me a comment and I will send you my info to add me.

(let me just say upfront, I make NO money from this, this is just a testimonial of my love to this service!)

I have professed my undying love of Skype before, but they just keep getting me all excited over and over again. The latest addition is SkypeIn, an honest-to-goodness phone number that will ring through to your computer.

Why should this excite you? Why should you be interested in another phone number in your life? Well, let’s say you move away from home, say you lived in New York City, and you moved to Los Angeles. You can buy a phone number through Skype for NYC, and then your friends and family can call you just like it was a local phone call. Let’s say you moved to another country…big deal…the “local phone call” would still find you no matter where you went. (well, as long as you had a net connection that is)

Did you move to the USA from one of the other countries Skype works with? (United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Poland and Sweden) You are allowed to have up to 10 SkypeIn numbers, so why not get one for your home country and the USA?

If you don’t want to be tied down to your computer for phone calls, there are several companies working on cordless Skype phone’s that will work with your computer, Wifi Router and regular phone lines in the works. They have varying release dates, but they should be coming out fairly soon.

So, how much does little wonder cost you? Well, a 12 month subscription is ? 30 (approx $37.31) and 3 months is ? 10 (approx $12.44). WAIT! What if you are away from your computer, or even worse, the computer is turned off when the phone call comes in? The subsciption includes Skype Voicemail for free.

Of course, you can also still just use Skype to talk to other Skype users for free anywhere in the world. I do have one note of disclaimer about SkypeIn though, if you get a NYC phone number, and someone from Miami calls it, they will stay pay long distance charges, so pick your number location wisely….or just get several SkypeIn numbers!

I just got invited to beta test voice mail with Skype. This is truly exciting because with this, the addition of being able to recieve SMS messages, and the possability that they will be adding incoming calls from land lines…wowzers. Now we just have to fear the fact that congress is considering taxing all internet bandwidth. Yay goverment!

I have been meaning to write about VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) for awhile, and decided it was finally time.

For those of you who have never heard of it, let me explain. VoIP is the method of being able to talk over the internet via your internet connection. Let me just say, if you are on a dial up connection, don’t even bother pondering this. If you have a good broadband connection though, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be looking into this! I am sure you are now asking yourself “But why should I care?” and that has an easy answer, it is dirt cheap phone calling.

There are a few different ways you can go about using this. There are pay services you can go through with either Vonage or AT&T CallVantage. These services will act like an actual phone line and have a monthly fee for having them. They will, however, give you free local and long distance phone calls and they will give you killer low rates for international calls. They also will allow you to either use special internet phones or use adapters to use your current phones.

To me though, the most exciting program is through the oddly named Skype.com. It works like an instant messenger program, but will also allow you to talk via voice to whoever else has the program. You can either use your computers built in microphone and speakers, or get a headset to use. To talk to someone else with the program is 100% free! This has been heaven sent for me as of late as I am setting up a new company with partners in various locations. It has worked like a charm for us. And if you want to call someone’s normal phone, you can do that also for about $.03 a minute. I have made numerous phone calls to regular land lines and cell phones with it, and they work with no noticeable problems. If you are going to use this program, I *highly* recommend as your headset the Plantronics DSP-100 Headset. I have purchased one for home and one for work I am so happy with it.

So do some of your own research, see what will work for you, but I really think this is the future of telephoning. Traditional land lines are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes on.