skype

If you've been following EQO, you may well know that we moved away from our mobile Skype product and built our own mobile VoIP network, which we launched this past May. Our decision to drop Skype is looking better and better all the time, especially today. When I got to work yesterday morning I was surprised to see that Skype wouldn't sign in to my account, then I read on Techcrunch that Skype was going through a massive outage. They've been down ever since, disappointing VoIPers worldwise no doubt. If you check their website, Skype have cleverly made the page title "Take a deep breath" and they are continually posting updates regarding their status. You can check their heartbeat blog for the latest status. Knowing what my life would be like right now if we were still operating our Skype product, I really feel sorry for the iSkoot guys right now...

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

For the first time ever, the recipient of the EQO Communications Beta tester of the month award is not named Bob.

This month's contest was a closely fought battle with several BlackBerry wielding Bobs (and even a Bill) challenging for the title. However, an EQO user from the Resplendent Isle stood out amongst the crowd of Bobs—Dimuthu Attanayake.

Dimuthu Attanayake of Sri Lanka earned March’s esteemed honour by testing the limits of his Motorola E1000. Dimuthu overcame a plethora of “Data Network Errors” to test EQO Mobile on the Teardrop of India. And although Dimuthu is still dealing with an EQO for Skype plug-in that is not cooperating with our servers, he is resilient in his effort to succeed. And for that, we salute him (and lavish him with free EQO cool stuff). Congratulations Dimuthu!

I am pretty excited that the Beta tester of the month award has made its first appearance on the Indian Ocean. Where will the award travel to next? Madagascar perchance? Maybe Reunion Island, or even Diego Garcia?

This month’s winner of the celebrated Beta tester award and free EQO prize pack is EQO user Bobby Rohrkemper. Bobby Rohrkemper had been trying for nine months to connect to our servers on his Sony-Ericsson k800i. For nine months (that's enough time to have a baby), whenever Bobby tried to start EQO Mobile he got the “EQO Mobile service is temporarily unavailable” error. Despite what this message was claiming, our fantabulous service has been available, continuously, for the last nine months. Incidentally, this is the second most annoying error message of all-time (the “Data Network Error” being the hands-down most annoying error message of all-time). Bobby, who is on the Orange network in Switzerland, tried every possible solution that he could think of and all of the possible solutions that Chris and I could throw at him. It seemed as if nothing was going to work; however, in mid-February Bobby’s persistence paid off. The combination of a helpful how-to post on our forum, the proper APN for Orange Switzerland (‘internet’), and the application of these settings to Bobby’s Java applications seemed to do the trick. For his patience and stick-to-ativeness, Bobby Rohrkemper incontestably deserves EQO’s Beta Tester of the month award for February!

Sometime last year I was reading Skype Journal and came across an article by Stuart Henshall (I think, can't find the article because their search doesn't seem to be working), regarding people with large Skype buddy lists. He was wondering why certain people had massive Skype buddy lists and was also interested in the composition of such lists. Ever since then, I too have been intrigued by the subject. Who uses Skype? Who are they calling? What types of calls are taking place? What do people use Skype for? These questions and others I still ponder. Clearly people use Skype to make all conceivable types of calls, but I'm more interested in the larger trends and I believe I've noticed one in particular.

I use Skype everyday to talk to coworkers and others I have dealings with via EQO. Since I leave my Skype client running on my work computer all day every day, I've had quite the opportunity to rack up an interesting contact list. I have 148 contacts and the breakdown is as such:

5 Friends

9 Random dudes who added me

17 Colleagues, people who don't work at EQO that I converse with pertaining to EQO

18 Demo/Test, for further EQO purposes

23 Work, assorted EQO employees

24 EQO Users

52 Random girls who added me

Which brings me to the revelation (that I've clearly been learning slowly over time, but revelation! sounds much more exciting), 52 random girls added me to Skype last year and called me to talk to me in person without knowing me or having seen a picture of me, merely based on my age, sex, and location statistics! I'm not saying I'm some kind of ladies man, since these girls had no idea who I was (and 9 random dudes added me, what does that tell you?). These ladies were just bored and looking for a Canadian guy to talk to, this blows my mind! They are all between the ages of 17 and 24, save one 44 year old out-lier (what did she have in mind?), and are based randomly throughout the world. In fact, only one is from Canada! It seems that the internet and very large distances have removed the fear from internet savvy, lonely girls world wide. I assume its a two way street, that surely these girls are solicited with Skype add requests by random dudes much more often than I.

Therefore, it seems that one of the primary uses of Skype is international flirting, who knew? I know I don't have the nerve to call random people and strike up a conversation...

You may wonder why I accept these random add requests? Well, it's because I'm curious as to what a random person might have to say to me, notwithstanding that they may be EQO users, which happens. Don't worry bosses, I don't talk to these lonely girls! In fact, I only use Skype at work for work; I wouldn't blog myself into trouble!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

A lot of people in the EQO community don’t even realize that they are Beta testers, so I wouldn’t expect many of them to know that they are eligible for a super-fantastic Beta tester award. That is why I’m announcing here, for the first time ever, the “EQO Communications Beta Tester of the Month” award.

A Beta test’s success relies primarily upon the comments of its Beta testers. Software developers need to hear both positive things, like “EQO Mobile’s IM is totally awesome!”, and constructive things, like “Why don’t you do it this way instead?”, so that they know what to improve upon and what to throw away. Here at EQO, we appreciate all of the valuable feedback that our Beta testers have given us over the last year. The "Beta Tester of the Month" award is just one way for us to show our appreciation.

EQO has some brilliant plans that will blow away the industry when they come to fruition. The thing is, we need people to help us execute our grand schemes of mobile communication domination (alliteration, point for me). I can't say whether or not working here would be the best thing for you people out there, but I will tell you why I enjoy working at EQO:

• Opinions and ideas are respected and considered whoever you are.
• We do fun things every Friday afternoon, stuff like chilling out over beers and snacks, playing soccer, going snowboarding, foosball tournaments, and the like.
• We have a million phones and I like playing with phones.
• The EQO staff are fun, nice people that give the office a friendly atmosphere.
• We have very spacious cubes.
• There are free, all you can eat cookies, plus the coffee never stops flowing.

If that isn't enough to convince you of how awesome working at EQO would be, consider this, you'd get to work with me. Just kidding, focus on the cookies.

Tomorrow is the big day. I sit here on the eve of launch writing this as the developers and QA rush to put the finishing touches on the latest EQO product, the nature of which I shall not reveal until tomorrow morning. What I will tell you is that it's pretty freaking cool. Does it involve phones? Yes. Does it involve online communities? Yes. Do you need Skype to use it? No.

We know that other online communities will benefit from the online extension to mobile phones that EQO has aptly demonstrated. The EQO for Skype product really showed what we can do in bringing an online buddy list to the mobile phone. Now we're going to show the world how EQO technology can be applied to truly extend online communities such as Myspace, Friendster, and others to the mobile.

I recently received a new Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming console. To actually use the PSP, I first had to spend about $100 on a memory stick PRO Duo. I then forked out another $75 on two games: Cars and HotShots Golf. For a handheld device, the audio and graphics quality on the PSP is awesome. The two games are not bad - for my kids.

VoIP spam or what is commonly referred to as "SPIT" (Spam over Internet Telephony) has been discussed extensively in the press but the problem appears completely contained. If you do a search on Google for "VoIP spam", all of the top ranked articles are of 2004 vintage. Is it simply that there is far greater economic incentive for a spammer to spend a few seconds to spam millions of people using email than to waste several seconds to annoy just one person using VoIP? If that is the case, voice communications has inherent anti-spamming characteristics.

For the past six years, if I needed to find anything on the internet, I have always used Google. For news and stock updates, I have consistently used Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. But lately, I noticed that my web surfing habits have evolved.