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Showing posts with label Skype. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skype. Show all posts

July 06, 2011

Facebook adds Skype video chat feature

Facebook has announced a partnership with Skype to add video chat to the social networking site.

The move is likely to be seen as a shot across the bow of Google, which recently launched a Facebook rival, Google+, also featuring video calling.

This is not the first time Facebook and Skype have teamed up - they already share some instant messaging tools.

May 30, 2011

Skype hit by global service crash

Skype has moved quickly to fix problems that hit users around the world.

Many people started to report that they had problems making calls via the net-based phone system earlier today.

The problem did not seem confined to one group, with users on machines running Windows, OS X and Linux all reporting trouble.

May 17, 2011

US multinationals acquire foreign companies to avoid tax

US MULTINATIONAL companies are putting more of their overseas earnings into cross-border mergers and acquisitions to avoid tax.

A Financial Times report claimed that the companies are concerned over tax bills incurred through repatriating so-called "trapped cash" in other jurisdictions. This has prompted a debate about whether companies are prioritising tax issues over business decisions.

December 22, 2010

Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic

By Maggie Shiels

Millions of people around the globe have been hit by an outage at the popular internet phone service Skype.

Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.

The company which prides itself on providing relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007.

"We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having," Tony Bates, Skype chief executive officer told BBC News.

"Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation," Mr Bates said.

On Skype's Twitter account, the company said their "engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal".

The news blog ReadWriteWeb said they have monitored complaints from users who reported that they are unable to log into the service and that the programme is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.

Mr Bates did not rule in or rule out the possibility of a malicious attack and said "all avenues" were being explored.

He estimated that as a result of the outage, Skype has lost around 10 million calls.

Mr Bates told the BBC that normal call volume for the time of day would be 20m.

Om Malik, an industry commentator and editor of the Gigaom.com website, is not impressed.

"Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web," he said.

"It is already a hit with consumers, and over the past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world. I am not sure we can comprehend the productivity cost of this outage.

"The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business. If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in light of this current outage," added Mr Malik.

Source: BBC
www.bbc.co.uk