Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

One thing missing from Skype is the ability to record calls.

As a journalist, I often need to make recordings of phone interviews - and getting them on my PC in digital format makes it easier to transcribe interviews (and hopefully soon, to search them). I have a small Sony recorder, but that uses a proprietary variant of ATRAC, and you need their software. It'll plug into a phone line, with a bit of kit from Maplin, but the recording quality, err, sucks. This device from Olympus looks good for the future, but I need something now!

Luckily, while doing some research for my Office column, I came across an Outlook plug-in called Skylook that not only integrates your Outlook address book with your Skype address book, so you can call people using Skype Out or Skype-to-Skype, but also records conversations as MP3s, ready for archiving and editing. There's even a built-in answerphone that adds calls to an Outlook folder. Microsoft may have made a splash earlier in the week with their unified messaging announcements, but Skylook's there already. Tie it in with the Skype-Salesforce.com integration and you've got a very interesting set of CRM tools...

The recording quality is good, and the size of the resulting MP3 isn't too bad either. Skylook's a rather useful piece of code. Businesses can use the recordings as part of any compliance procedure, while the rest of us can quickly turn them into podcasts (or should that be "skypecasts"?).

There's a 14 day trial, and the final registration cost isn't too bad either. A nice bit of code from our Aussie cousins...

Skype 2.0 has just gone into Beta.

It's added video. Is web cam driven video calling over VOIP going to finally be the killer app the video phone folk have been looking for? After all, the folks at Creative are launching a Skype-branded web camera to go along with the Motorola Skype headsets...

Certainly Skype has the mythical multiplier of the network effect on its side as it begins work on popularising video and voice over IP (shall we take a stab at calling it VVOIP?). As I type this there are just under 4 million people connected to the Skype network. All they need is a cheap web cam and a software upgrade, and that's 4 million VVOIP users ready to burn the bandwidth. That's a lot easier to do than when BT, and most recently Alan Sugar, tried to launch video phone services over the POTS network.

Now to get the Gizmo Project folks to add video to their SIP system. Will that give us video blogging for LJ, along with the Gizmo-driven voice blogging service announced earlier this week?

One problem for most of us , wherever we are, is the lack of access to international free phone numbers...

While some SIP-based VOIP softphones allow you to call US 800 numbers, the rest of the world has been a bit of a black hole. However, Skype is now opening up its SkypeOut service to give us all access to toll free-numbers, without needing a subscription...

A useful thing to remember...

...as now there's a Skype plug-in for Trillian.

Not quite a true standalone tool - it uses the Skype APIs to handle integration, so Skype needs to be running. But you can start calls, and have Skype IM chats without leaving Trillian.

All in all, quite useful.

[Update: Trillian 3.0 and above only - Sorry Alan!]