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Joost now open and free for everyone

If you haven't managed to snag one of the free beta tokens from another Joost user, today is your lucky day, because the service has launched version 1.0, and is free and open to anyone who wants to use it. The once invite-only video content program is one of the few services we've seen since Google's Gmail to successfully use beta access to both intentionally control the scale of its user base and build up hype. It also doesn't hurt when it's created by the same duo that made Skype and Kazaa.

If you've been a loyal Joost user since the company rolled out its private beta last year, version 1.0 isn't a whole lot different from the latest build, however the newer "plastic" menus are much better looking than the contrastacular ones of yore. There's also a ton of content, which Joost pits somewhere above 150,000 shows, spanned across 250 or so "channels," including one with entire episodes of the original Transformers series.… Read more

Joost now open and free for everyone

If you haven't managed to snag one of the free beta tokens from another Joost user, today is your lucky day, because the service has launched version 1.0, and is free and open to anyone who wants to use it. The once-invite-only video content program is one of the few services we've seen since Google's Gmail to successfully use beta access to both intentionally control the scale of its user base and build up hype. It also doesn't hurt when it's created by the same duo that made Skype and Kazaa.

If you've … Read more

Talk about short memories--eBay's Skype experiment

Hand it to eBay's management. Despite blowing billions on one of the dumbest mergers in recent tech history, the company remains in remarkably good shape.

Maybe eBay will fess up to a nasty surprise during its third-quarter earnings call, but so far there's little evidence to suggest anything is amiss with the company's auction business. I can't say the same about the expensive chemistry experiment that was the Skype integration.

When it acquired Skype a couple of years ago, eBay argued that the pickup would help move the company beyond its core online auction business. Didn'… Read more

Swapping Vonage for Skype: One man's search for VoIP that actually works

Yes, you read the headline right. I have long been a critic of Skype, suggesting that eBay was foolish to buy the VoIP toy and generally ridiculing it as a serious business tool.

Today I'm eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I'm now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype.… Read more

Skype worm attempts to steal personal information

Like worms that have attacked MSN Messenger, AOL IM and Yahoo Messenger in the recent past, a worm is currently attacking Skype IM users. From an infected machine, the virus known as either Ramex.a (Skype) or Pykspa.a (McAfee) or Skipi.a shoots messages with a live link to people on the infected machine's Skype contact list. A JPEG image within the message provides a download link to a file with the SCR extension. Recipients who click on the link are then infected.

Once installed, the worm injects bogus entries into the computer's HOSTS file so that … Read more

Shiny office toys galore at Office 2.0

For a conference about getting work done, there are sure a whole lot of toys here at Office 2.0 in San Francisco. Sure many of them are old hat, like the the Nabaztag/tag, but there's some new stuff here too like Pano Logic's zero client desktop. This shiny metal cube is actually a computer--well kind of. Actually it involves setting up a a beefy server to give everyone in your office a full version of Windows sans hardware. Just give give them a keyboard, mouse, monitor and one of these shiny cubes and they're ready … Read more

IP telephony start-ups attract cash

Despite SunRocket's recent implosion, venture capitalists are hot to invest in voice over IP start-ups.

A company called Jaxtr announced Tuesday that it's raised $10 million. The company, which hopes to emulate the success of eBay's Skype, actually attracted some of the same investors as Skype. Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital, all early stage investors in Skype, contributed to Jaxtr's first round of funding.

Jaxtr is one of a growing number of IP telephony start-ups hoping to make it big. These companies are leaning more toward Skype's business model as a complementary … Read more

Should small businesses rely on Skype?

Several readers blasted me for my blog post last week about the Skype outage. I assumed that many of the people using Skype's messaging and voice over IP service didn't rely on the service for their primary form of communication. But several people pointed out that many small businesses use Skype to communicate with clients, employees and partners.

These comments got me thinking about this segment of the market. And now I'm working on a story that will take a look at how small businesses use free communications services like Skype instead of products that they would … Read more

Skype blames its outage on Microsoft Windows

When I first read the headline, I was shocked. I thought, "Wow! Skype runs on Windows servers???"

But no. Skype blamed its outage over the weekend on a different kind of Windows problem. It turns out that when you have millions of Windows machines restarting at the same time (getting their weekly doses of patches because, um, the system is rock-solid), it can cause all sorts of problems for others.

Like Skype. As reports The Register:… Read more