Netflix's CEO Reed Hastings thinks he has a great idea to stop more customers from defecting since its recent price hike: split his company into two operations, require users to maintain two separate accounts, and add video games. Hastings announced late Sunday that Netflix plans to rebrand its DVD by mail business as Qwikster, giving the new brand a separate website and independent viewing queue. Qwikster will also expand into video game rentals for Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Hastings named Andy Rendich, who currently heads up the Netflix DVD service, as Qwikster CEO.
Play the latest, most popular, and top rated online games 100% for free. Wide selection of games by genre: action, adventure, strategy, puzzles, sports, RPG, and shooting.
In an effort to incentivise players to learn about its privacy policy, Facebook game developer Zygna today revealed PrivacyVille, a new "game-like tutorial" that offers rewards to users.
The Federal Communications Commission registered its Net neutrality rules with the Office of Management and Budget yesterday, which is the next step in making the new regulations official.
MyMobileTube is a Internet TV, Digital TV provider for your desktops, laptops, notebooks, pda's and mobiles via internet, gprs and satellites. It provides free latest software's to download on to mobiles and desktops for watching 100 of channels free of cost. Watch best videos, movies and listen to music, get updated news by mobiletube.
VideoLAN is a project that was started by students at the École Centrale Paris in France. The software was first released under the open source GNU General Public License and is now continuously being developed by contributors worldwide. It originally consisted of two programs - the VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN Server (VLS). They were later merged into one program, the VLC Media Player.
The .xxx top-level domain will open for registrations from the public this afternoon, over a decade after the controversial adults-only internet address was first proposed.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday to the L.A. Times that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA online petition in one day. Google's petition, which is still available to sign as of Wednesday night, is linked from Google's homepage and was part of the search company's effort to increase awareness of the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act.
German scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have succeeded in encoding data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam, transmitting them over a distance of 50 km, and decoding them successfully. This is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam. The process developed by KIT allows to transmit the contents of 700 DVDs in one second only.
Google said Tuesday that it had begun to transcode all new videos on YouTube to the WebM codec, an open source effort supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and others. The technology supports high-quality video using the HTML5 video tag, and is available for use under a royalty-free license.
So that's exactly how much time I spend on Facebook per day at work? Kidding. Cumulatively, Americans spend more time on Facebook than on any other website. In the month of May alone, Nielsen estimates that the whole population spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on the social network. That's also about the equivalent of 100,000 years, or 36.8 million days.
It certainly is a rocky time for WiMAX provider Clear. The company's CEO Bill Morrow has suddenly resigned, citing "personal reasons" according to a company press release. But that's not the only problem: it is now the subject of a lawsuit filed in Washington state last week.
If you're an AT&T home broadband subscriber, the all-you-can-eat buffet is closed. May 2 marks the start of data caps for AT&T DSL and U-Verse customers.
Thierry Breton caused a sensation last week when he told an interviewer that he planned to ban internal email at the information technology services giant, Atos.
Chinese search engine giant Baidu said Wednesday it had deleted nearly three million works from its online library in a three-day blitz aimed at ending a copyright dispute with writers.
Over the past decade, online piracy has cost the music, film, television, and game industries tens of billions of dollars per year worldwide. One 2006 study by the Institute for Policy Innovation showed that movie piracy alone results in $20.5 billion in lost output among U.S. industries annually, $5.5 billion in lost annual earnings among U.S. workers, 141,030 jobs lost, and $837 million in lost annual tax revenue.
Slowly but steadily, Microsoft Bing has become a potent threat to Google in the search market. Over the last few months, Microsoft's aggressive strategy with Bing has started to yield market share gains over competitors Google, Yahoo and AOL in the U.S. search market. Bing's market share, which was around 11% in September 2010, is now close to 14% as of February 2011.
Modern man is surrounded by a multitude of sensors. Today's sensors are simple and made for specific purposes, like measuring temperature, balance, build-up of smoke, or tyre pressure. The common trait of the sensors is that they are all embedded in a closed system.
an online education company transforming the Internet into a dynamic web-based teaching and learning environment for colleges, universities and organizations through course delivery.
Suite of web-based applications including calendar, e-mail, instant messaging, file cabinet, SecureSend, blueCards, contact manager, that help businesses to communicate, collaborate and manage their information.
Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.
Anyone who has tried to provide computing assistance over the phone will know just how frustrating an experience it can be. Without the ability to interact with a problematic computer, it can be hard to diagnose just what the problem is, and having to rely on someone else to explain what the issue is can be all but useless. There are a number of remote access tools that can be useful in these circumstances, but Chrome Remote Desktop Beta is an extension for the Chrome browser that brings remote access to the web browser.
In an outburst emblematic of the generational animosity raised by SOPA, Rupert Murdoch tweeted directly about Google as the agents of piracy who sell ads around links to pirated IP. He has a point--but soon realized that he had missed the point--and backpedaled slightly by begrudgingly acknowledging Google's value as a company. Like artist Doug Wheeler who makes light palpable with his "infinity environments," it's hard to attack Google since they are atmospheric in their reach.
Cnet has come under fire for wrapping downloads of the popular Nmap network analysis tool and other open-source software packages with a toolbar of dubious utility.
But it's going to be slow going, and for good reasons. Despite all IPv6 promises, there is still much, much testing to do before it's ready for prime time.
The head of the influential U.S. Copyright Office plans to offer an unqualified endorsement tomorrow of a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill.
The CEO of Righthaven, Las Vegas attorney Steve Gibson, says an extremely unfavorable ruling handed down by a federal court judge Tuesday won't end his campaign of suing copyright-infringing websites on behalf of newspapers. "We're obviously disappointed in the decision," which found that Righthaven lacks legal standing to pursue many of the lawsuits it has filed, says Gibson. "It raises an interesting question as to who does have standing."
The San Jose, Calif.-based auction site is alarmed by forthcoming legislation, reported yesterday by CNET, that would allow states to require taxes to be collected from even very small out-of-state Internet retailers--some of eBay's best customers, in other words.
mission is to deliver business-critical communications services to individuals and corporations throughout the world. These services include web-based fax, voicemail, and conference calling.
EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
Faceboook.com is the domain to have (count the 'o's) if phishing scams are your game. That's because it's the most popular mistyped entry into a browser URL bar, according to data collected and analyzed by Chris Finke from his browser add-on, URL Fixer. The site suggests to errant visitors to they've won some sort of contest for Facebook users.
Facebook has stepped firmly into Twitter's territory with the purchase of messaging start-up Beluga, sure to be pushing status updates to a phone near you any day now.
According to a report at ReadWriteWeb, social networking giant Facebook hit a huge milestone in Internet history as it became the first website to attract 1,000,000,000,000 page views.
Facebook has reportedly decided to put off its highly anticipated initial public offering until the latter part of 2012, according to the Financial Times.
Facebook is to carry out its long awaited plan to allow third-party developers who write applications and games for the site, to access users current address and phone numbers if added to profiles.
Yesterday, TechCrunch's MG Siegler wrote about an unreleased Facebook photo app for the iPhone. Today, he's reporting that Facebook is working on a super-ambitious platform for Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad—one that uses HTML5 to deliver the sort of experience usually associated with native iOS apps. He doesn't have any real details, but it could be cool, and would explain Mark Zuckerberg's famous disinterest in doing a Facebook app for the iPad.
So just how much is Facebook going to be worth by the time it eventually IPOs? Given that prediction, especially about the future, is very difficult, who knows?
Facebook, Google, and 19 other companies have been asked to censor objectionable material in India by a lower court. Instead of complying, the Internet giants are fighting back in a higher court.
The Senate's controversial Protect IP Act, which would significantly expand both public and private enforcement of online copyright and trademark infringement, is returning to center stage.
The backbone of the Internet, FTP (file transfer protocol), celebrates its 40th birthday tomorrow. Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born.
More than a month after Kansas City, Kan., announced it would be the first place to get Google's ultra-fast broadband service, Kansas City, Mo., leaders declared their city the envy of the entire world after the search engine giant said it was expanding the service to their town.
OpenDNS, Google, and a few others have built a new technology into their Internet operations that's designed to speed up the delivery of data around the globe.
With a sustained data rate of 186 gigabits per second, high-energy physicists demonstrate the efficient use of long-range networks to support cutting-edge science
Access to the Internet should be seen as a fundamental human right and respected as much as freedom of expression, the transatlantic security body OSCE said in a report Friday.
What began as an attempt to restrain foreign piracy on the Internet has morphed into a domestic "kill switch" on First Amendment freedom in the fastest-growing corner of the marketplace of ideas.
Net news and resources on Web development, Java, browsers, e-commerce and a list of over 3,000 ISPs are only a few of the offerings that will guide your online journey.
There's some rough news for Topeka, Kan., the city that courted Google's ultra-high-speed municipal broadband project by changing its name to Google. The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant announced Wednesday that the lucky city that gets to be its broadband guinea pig not only isn't Topeka, but it's Kansas City, Kansas--just an hour's drive away. Ouch.
Joining its fellow social-networking companies in the public release of internal code, LinkedIn has opened sourced software obtained in October with its acquisition of the IndexTank search-engine software provider.
The controversial anti-piracy bills that attracted tens of millions of dollars of lobbying for and against the proposed laws ironically were killed by free publicity.
It's not just Adobe that's altering its plans when it comes to browser plugins designed to play back rich web media -- Microsoft's joining in too. New releases of Silverlight, Redmond's big competitor to Flash Player, are reportedly going to be abandoned after the launch of Silverlight 5, expected later this month. This information comes from multiple sources cited by the usually well-informed Mary Jo Foley.
There is no love lost between Microsoft and Sony. For many years now they have been fierce rivals in the video games market. That rivalry started when Microsoft introduced the first Xbox which failed to top the PlayStation 2 in terms of popularity. In round two of that fight, things are a lot more even between the Xbox 360 and PS3. But there really is no clear winner.
Mozilla, the open-source organization responsible for Firefox, joined other major technology companies today to protest anti-piracy legislation by blackening the browser's home page.
Netflix accounts for nearly 30 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak times, more than any other source, says Sandvine Research. Even when combined with upstream traffic, Netflix is still on top with almost a quarter of all peak Internet traffic.
The streaming video company Netflix has said more than once that the idea of ISP putting broadband data caps on their service is little more than a money grab on their part. Now the company is using the editorial pages of a major newspaper to get their point across. The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece today written by Netflix's general counsel David Hyman where he writes, "Bandwidth caps with fees piled on top are a lousy way to manage traffic."
Northwestern University researchers have developed a new switching device that takes quantum communication to a new level. The device is a practical step toward creating a network that takes advantage of the mysterious and powerful world of quantum mechanics.
A bipartisan bill introduced on Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives will require Internet service providers to retain subscriber information for up to 18 months to assist federal law enforcement in investigations into online child pornography and child exploitation cases.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced the activation of an ultra-high speed network connection for scientists, researchers and educators at universities and National Laboratories that is at least ten times faster than commercial Internet providers. The project — funded with $62 million from the 2009 economic stimulus law — is intended for research use but could pave the way for widespread commercial use of similar technology.
The growing anti-SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) support that has swept through the gaming and Internet community found a very big ally today. With websites like Reddit and Wikipedia and gaming organizations like Major League Gaming prepared for a blackout on January 18th – the same day that the House Judiciary Committee hearing on HR 3261 was scheduled in Washington, DC – President Barack Obama has stepped in and said he would not support the bill. SOPA has been killed, for now.
President Obama's first "virtual town hall" in 2009 took a legalize-pot detour. This afternoon, his first Google+ hangout with a handful of voters turned to a no less controversial topic: a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills.
Fully managed online data protection and recovery service that backs up server data, archives it in a secure off-site data center and makes it immediately available for recovery 24x7x365. 30-day Risk-Free Trial.
OpenDNS, a popular third-party Domain Name System (DNS) provider, is now offering IPv6 DNS support. The company claims that "OpenDNS is the first major recursive DNS service in the world to offer the service."
Two recently published studies out of Seattle Children's Research Institute indicate that certain levels of media usage can lead to depression in college students as well as disrupt sleep patterns in preschool children.
On Friday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it had entered an agreement with ICM Registry that allows the company to run .XXX as a top-level domain.
Wednesday in a blog, Red Hat offered its two cents concerning the drama surrounding SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate). The company points out that now isn't really the time to introduce the bills, as corporations, small independent companies and even the government itself is working hard to rebuild confidence in the American economy. Red Hat -- along with most of America -- worries that these two bills, if passed, could effect jobs and innovation nationwide. Not only could they break the Internet, they could break a fragile economy trying to recover.
A week from today, one of the most popular websites on the internet will go dark. Reddit, the current king of all social media sites due to its massive, influential community and ability to send out hundreds of thousands of hits to a single post, is doing its part to help stop internet censorship law SOPA with a display of force.
At least one powerful Republican member of the US House of Representatives takes a dim view of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) wending it way through the House.
The sponsor of the anti-piracy bill SOPA has agreed to drop DNS blocking of websites from the proposed legislation after a joint statement from leading White House officials.
Supposedly we've won today. Both the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives have been shelved by their respective sponsors. However, these acts have been shelved before, and the bags of money sent to DC didn't suddenly devalue, so I'm sure the next SOPA is being written as we speak.
Monday, Amazon and Netflix, two major competitors in the video streaming space announced new content partnerships that broaden their catalogs and represent the next generation of carriage agreements that occur every three years in the cable and pay TV business.
Last year, when Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, it got a wealth of customers, technologies and personnel for its US$7.4 billion. It also obtained one of the choicest domain names on the Internet, Sun.com.
Google led, orchestrated, politically-framed and set the political tone for much of the Web’s opposition to pending anti-piracy legislation, SOPA/PIPA, because rule of law and effective enforcement of property rights online represent a clear and present danger to Google’s anti-property-rights mission, open philosophy, business model, innovation approach, competitive strategy, and culture.
These WELL members return to The WELL, often daily, to engage in discussion, swap information, express their convictions and greet their friends in online forums known as WELL Conferences.
Trademark owners can prevent their names from being misused in the new .xxx top-level domain by blocking these names, ICM Registry, the Florida-based registry operator for the .xxx top-level domain said.
The number of people who have registered accounts on Twitter has now surpassed 200 million, a representative of the company said publicly yesterday. Katie Stanton, Twitter's VP of International Strategy, said at the Guardian Activate conference in New York that there are now more than 200 million Twitter accounts worldwide and more than 70% of all Twitter's traffic comes from outside the U.S. That means Stanton's job is very important and whatever her International Strategy is, it seems to be working. Roughly 25% of all tweets come from Japan alone, she said.
According to a company blog post, Twitter users are now sending 200 million tweets each day. That figure becomes quite impressive when one considers that in January 2009, 2 million tweets were sent per day. And a year ago, the daily tweet tally stood at 65 million a day.
Working separately on two different types of technology, two groups have developed a type of fiber cable capable of delivering over 100 terabits of data per second; several orders of magnitude higher than anything currently in use. The first group figured out a way to shove more data into a single signal, while the second group created a fiber cable with multiple cores, rather than just the standard one.
The British judge presiding over a wide-ranging inquiry into media ethics and practices has suggested that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter should be seen differently than traditional publishers.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications ("Strong plasmonic enhancement of photovoltage in graphene"), a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, which includes Nobel Prize winning scientists Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov, has discovered a crucial recipe for improving characteristics of graphene devices for use as photodetectors in future high-speed optical communications.
When college students begin classes this month, some arrive after getting their acceptance notices on Facebook. Others are using smartphone applications to find out which parking spots are available. And others show up after taking walking tours through their campuses - without ever leaving their homes.
Most of us can still remember the horrors of dial-up internet: being unable to make a phone call while online; the seemingly endless wait while the modem tried to establish a connection; the pain of waiting a full half-hour to download a single low-bitrate music file. How far we have come since those dark days — and yet, even today, almost all of us still have those moments when the web feels just too darned slow.
Whether designing a single page site, or multilevel interactive sites, CPSource will bring your ideas to the world in an unforgettable, and affordable way!
In the survey, which forms part of Ofcom's media literacy report, just 23% said they would struggle without television, with 26% missing the web and 28% missing their phones. However, with this, the survey also found that Millennials were spending more time online than last year, from mobile access to games console use.
The Obama administration said over the weekend that it would not support legislation mandating changes to Internet infrastructure to fight online copyright and trademark infringement.
The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making "illegal streaming" of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.
The founder of Wikipedia hailed the online encyclopedia's role in helping halt U.S. legislation aimed at cracking down on Internet piracy, saying the proposed bills needed to be stopped because they were flawed.
SOPA blackout day has arrived, and Wikipedia is going farther than the planned 12-hour protest -- from 8 am to 8 pm. The community encyclopedia is going down for twice as long. Today, we'll all learn just how important Wikipedia is to the Internet community. I find it a valuable resource as a journalist. Will you miss it?
As the online complement to Wired Magazine, Wired News posts breaking stories from the digital world, emphasizing industry news, online culture and Internet privacy issues.
Yahoo today announced upgrades to its search product that bring up search results in real-time as a query is typed, much like the "Google Instant" technology launched last year. Called "Search Direct," Yahoo says this still-in-beta service will provide "a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links."
Speech-based capabilities within social networks could significantly disrupt the existing voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and telecom landscape, according to a survey on consumer communication habits conducted by Vivox. Does the name of that company sound familiar?
Skype is such a bastion of basic Internet service that most of us at this point take free VoIP and dirt cheap telephone calls for granted. Unfortunately, Skype never has been able to do the same: the company has always had a hard time with profitability, and it's been traded and sold so many times between various parties at this point that it may very well be one of Silicon Valley's most in-demand call girls.
The new Nexxis video-over-IP network solution from Barco uses a high bandwidth 10 Gbps network to interconnect the ever growing number of video feeds and image sources and displays being used inside the OR.
Did Skype's total failure last holiday season get you worried? Are you tired of Skype's generally poor quality even at its free price-tag? Afraid of what Microsoft might do with Skype? According to ZDNet's own unscientific survey, 41% of you are less likely to use MS-Skype.
Comcast and Skype announced that the two have struck up a deal to bring the VoIP service to Comcast HDTVs. This could prove to be a lot more useful than just a video chat with relatives.
IT Outsourcing and networking, Products for IT Risk Management, Business Intelligence software consulting and support, IP Phone Systems consulting, installation and support.
Ooma, a VoIP provider had the dual inconveniences of what they described as a "rare" partial power failure at their unnamed datacenter provider and what appeared to be asimultaneous DDoS attack on their corporate website, which left their customers unable to use their service, or even check on the status of their accounts while Ooma rushed to recover from the problems.
In a news conference today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg unveiled his vision for the next five years of Facebook, and announced a few new features to the popular social networking platform that might look familiar to those of you lucky enough to be using Google+
Whether you use them for business communication, talking to family over long distances, or just fragging your friends over the latest FPS, communication has been revolutionized by voice calling apps. Here's a look at the five most popular options for having voice conversations over the internet.
There's no denying that Skype is by far the most ubiquitous VoIP service today, but a new project launched this week aims to create an open source alternative.
Google has moved its Google Talk VoIP infrastructure to Jingle, the voice and media signaling protocol that seeks to provide an open-standard alternative to the proprietary protocols used by the Microsoft-owned Skype and other VoIP technologies.
Now that we’ve moved to VOIP and unified messaging, it’s time to finally bury the fax machine and get some real online document and information management tools.
Besides search and social networking, Google keeps getting deeper and deeper into the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. While Google hasn't opened the doors for anyone in the world to use Google Voice yet, Google has just made it possible for Google Talk users to call land-line and mobile phones around the world.
When the massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in March brought down the voice-over-IP (VoIP) call processing supplied by TelePacific Communications to thousands of its customers, it marked a turning point for the local-exchange services provider in its thinking about security.
Microsoft's massive $8.5 billion purchase of the popular Skype Internet phone service is still a few months away, according to statements from a Skype executive. The AFP news service (via Google) quotes the company' chief executive Tony Bates as saying, "We already got through the US side of it. We still have Europe so it's anyone's guess, but I would say we've got a couple of months more here. Maybe sort of an October timeframe would be my guess."
It has been reported on several news sites that Microsoft filed a patent back in December 2009, that involves the use of VoIP technology to silently record calls sent over a network. Given that Microsoft recently bought the popular Skype service, there is a real chance Microsoft could or indeed has, implemented the technology in order to do so.
As the focus of mobile usage moves further from minutes and text bundles, towards megabytes of data, mobile network operators are unsurprisingly concerned at this shift, and the potential loss of revenue that it represents to them. Frustrated by the ongoing restrictions imposed upon its Skype service in the UK,
I'm bemused to see that Microsoft's Grand Poobah Steve Ballmer has blundered yet again. This time, instead of Vista, the operating system that never should have seem the light of day, or Windows Phone 7, the far too little, too late, attempt to play in mobile devices, he's wasted a cool $8.5-billion (Billion!) on Skype.
NetTALK DUO saves you money by letting you ditch traditional telephone service in favor of Internet-based calls using an ordinary phone handset connected to your router. The flat yearly cost, about $30, is competitive. If you're going to go the VoIP route and still want a handset, netTALK is your best bet.
O2 has announced it is going to try some VoIP services, under the brand of O2 Connect, while in America T-Mobile has opened up its Bobsled service to compete with Google Voice.
Researchers have devised a new scheme for hiding secret data within VoIP packets, making it possible to carry on legitimate voice conversations while stolen data piggybacks on the call undetected, making its way to thieves on the outside.
Skype is not just sitting around waiting for its planned acquisition by Microsoft to be officially approved and closed. The Internet phone company is staying busy with some work of its own. On Sunday the company announced that it has bought GroupMe, a mobile messaging company that's based in New York City and was founded in 2010. While Skype didn't announce the specific financial terms of the deal, AllThingsDigital claims via unnamed sources that Skype paid $85 million to acquire GroupMe.
Skype has updated its Android app, with the biggest change being that VoIP calls are now supported over 3G in the US. Previous versions of the app had limited 3G voice calls via Skype to WiFi connections, though only in the US; now, it seems Skype has wrangled access from the carriers for all.
When it comes to VOIP, video conferencing, and screensharing applications, Skype rules the roost. Not too far back, Microsoft made headlines by completing a multi-billion dollar acquisition of the company — which will likely result in Skypetastic new features for Lync, its unified enterprise communications server. That could be especially important following an announcement on the official Skype blog this morning: Skype has been approved for use in the Halls of Congress.
iPhone and iPad users can now be charged by the minute for Wi-Fi access, thanks to the expanded Skype Access service which now includes fondle-slabs and Jesus mobes as well as computers.
The company blames the recession for hitting demand but the rise of VoIP appears at last to be affecting the international phone call market, with market leader Skype set to add 45 billion call minutes to its share during 2010 for direct calls between its customers.
Skype is working to fix a security hole in its iOS app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows a hacker to steal a person's entire address book. The vulnerability, located in the app's chat message window, can be exploited with JavaScript code. It was pointed out by security researcher Phil Purviance of AppSec.
Skype has decided not to renew an agreement that allows open-source telephony system Asterisk to be integrated with the service using software developed with Digium.
Microsoft has completed the $8.5 billion acquisition of consumer VoIP and instant messaging service provider Skype from investment firm Silver Lake that was first announced six months ago.
In a blog post, John Luther, the Project Manager of Google's WebM Project, has announced that Skype now supports the VP8 codec. The VP8 support is already available for Windows users who are using Skype 5.5. VP8 will be used to encode and decode the Skype video call if both the caller and receiver have clients that supports the codec.
Skype just got so easy your great-grandmother could use it without having to know anything about a sound card or any other input/output doohickeys that are more convoluted than President Harding and his confounding Teapot Dome scandal! (Look it up, millennials...)
A portion of Skype users found themselves without service Tuesday after a configuration problem caused the VoIP provider's systems to crash. A message to Heartbeat, Skype's status page, indicated that the company was aware of the problem and was working to fix it.
Skype has further irked its users, already put out by an outage last week, by pushing a Windows add-on that installed itself on users' systems whether or not they gave it permission to install.
Skype has published an update that provides an easy way for users to log back into the system following a software glitch that resulted in the VoIP service hanging up on users on Thursday.
Apparently unhappy with the current Skype for Mac version, the VoIP company is soliciting users, developers, fans, whoever to design the next look for the application.
Skype has rolled out a new version of its VoIP software for the Android platform that brings video calling to the table. Well, it does if you own one of only four Android handsets currently: HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S. That's not very many of the dozens of Android handsets on the market, but owners of other phones will have to wait for support in the future.
Skype is known primarily for providing Internet-based VoIP (voice over IP) calling, with video chat and conferencing a close second. You might not be aware that Skype also has a service to provide cheap Wi-Fi access at over one million locations around the world. Today, Skype revealed that Skype WiFi is now available for iOS devices as well.
In 2005, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion to bring voice communications to the online auction site, claiming the combination would "revolutionise the ease with which people can communicate through the internet." Four years later, eBay sold Skype for $2.75 billion because no one wanted to talk to the other party in a transaction.
Microsoft, long the enemy of open source software, announces a pending deal to buy Skype and Skype promptly ditches a partnership with an open source company. Those two things have to be related, right?
Google Voice has been the in-crowd's way to make and receive calls for a while now, but for the past few weeks I've been doing something with even more hipster cred.
Wireless carrier T-Mobile is no stranger to VoIP, having experimented with it for a time through its now defunct Hotspot@Home service, which ended last year. Well, it's trying again, but this time bringing the technology to social networking site Facebook.
A small VoIP company has had to change its name after being threatened with legal action over its use of the word 'cloud' in its name by European Wi-Fi network The Cloud.
Viber, the popular VoIP app previously available only to iPhone users, will begin rolling out its beta version for Android this week. Viber allows users to make phone calls over 3G and WiFi connections (no word yet on 4G support) to other Viber users. The app also supports free text messaging through its interface. With a free Viber account you'll have "unlimited" calling and texting to any fellow Viber subscriber on either Android or iPhone. (The service does use data instead of voice, so Viber is only as "unlimited" as your data plan.)
Vodafone is increasingly adopting local partners, rather than buying up local operators, to push its brand and services into new markets around the world.
Viruses and computer hacking have become common terms we all hear regularly in news reports and online. And while the concept of a virus is easy to understand, mainly because we are all taught how biological viruses work in our own body, it's difficult to understand exactly what is going on during an attack inside your PC.
Vonage can lower your monthly home phone bill pretty significantly, but it can't match the deep savings you'll get from netTALK DUO—unless you make a lot of international calls. Vonage's international plans are superb.
As soon as word spread that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion dollars, my Twitter stream filled with tweets worrying that Microsoft would somehow ruin the service (yes, there was at least one primal scream). Millions rely on the the free online voice and video calling service to stay in touch with friends, family and co-workers, while paying little or nothing. Others more astutely guessed that Microsoft was buying the VoIP calling service to block Google from buying it.