VoIP News: "The 5 Best Skype Extras"
With an unsteady performance since its purchase by eBay Inc., its founder’s costly departure, the emergence of Skype spam, significant competition, outages and poor customer service, many have speculated that Skype could be the next item for auction at eBay. Yet, despite all the bad news and crabby blog posts, more than 100 million people worldwide are registered Skype users, and 60,000 new users sign up every day.
With so many of my network of contacts acquiring Macs these days, I do find that, with Yugma’s cross-platform capability which Jim highlights, I am using it as my de facto desktop sharing application in presentations and discussions.
Having had a chance to see both the Sony PlayStationPortable and Sony mylo COM-2 at CES, I have to say the latter offers the more intriguing embedding of Skype. Whereas the PSP only offers voice, the second generation mylo offers both voice and IM along with use of Skype file transfer to send pictures and other files. In fact, I have seen one review where the new mylo should be considered as good competition for the iPod Touch.
What I’m seeing with the add-ins is how Skype has really become a pipe within a pipe, something I felt was coming around the time of eBay’s acquisition. With each add-in it becomes easier and easier for two way communications users to build their world around Skype for many interactive, one on one activities, like web conferencing and desktop sharing. This Top 5 list bears that out once again.