Technically Speaking

Well if you believe this non-confirmed rumor, it appears that Google may be purchasing Skype. It does make some sense, and hey when you have billions of dollars, you may as well buy something worthwhile, right?

Currently in favour around London’s webbist community is the rumour that Google has been in negotiations to buy Skype, the web telephony firm, from eBay.

Technically Speaking, a few interesting things going on this morning on this short holiday week.

Skype’s founder is quoted today saying that eBay overpaid for them. Interesting that he would admit that now, but nevertheless, eBay hasn’t made too many smart moves. Hey, online garage sales are not my thing.

“We overshot in terms of monetization … Our position in the market has strengthened … you need to look at the long-term value of companies,” he said.

EBay said last week it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling service Skype two years ago.

The write-down on the value of the deal came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, and marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.

Technically Speaking, makes you wonder how many other companies have overpaid, Google sure makes a lot of purchases.

Skype CEO - Resigned today. It appears that the eBay/Skype merger hasn’t gone as they had all hoped for. Skype still rocks, eBay still sucks - unless you just like spending your money in the world’s biggest yard/garage sale.

Joost - Now you don’t have to wait for one of those Joost invites. Although Joost seems cool, I have had latency issues via wireless which I am most of the time. I actually like a Chinese product called TV.Koo a bit better.

Technically Speaking, get out there on the blogs and read. Than make sure you visit GMAFB to post some of the stupid, funny, and WTF items of the day; sign up if you don’t have an account! drug rehab

Skype is offering FREE Skype out calls today. So go ahead call your mom on Skype. Call your startup web site developer in India today all for FREE! Technically Speaking, this is a great offer so you might want to take advantage of it today.

Just received this from Sameer of ZapTXT. He sent over the examples, but basically ZapTXT is now on Skype. The examples are very nice, and for those of you that are still in the dark about this great service, he was kind enough to send along a nice overview which is below. Technically Speaking, ZapTXT and Sameer has been really supportive of our efforts on this blog. ** UPDATE ** - the official ZapTXT release information. ** Please take a moment and discover what a great service ZapTXT truly is.

ZapTXT allows you to combine and filter feed sets and receive alerts when your topics appear on any of your selected RSS-enabled website headlines. Alerts come to you via IM, email, SMS text or custom RSS feed. Users can either come to ZapTXT to create a task or use our browser bookmarklet to monitor a web page that they are visiting.

ZapTXT can be used for monitoring topics on blogs and comments and a host of other services that offer RSS feeds such as Weather, Online Calendars, Wikis, Traffic, eBay Stores and Classifieds sites such as Craigslist.

Here’s a run down of what a user can do with ZapTXT

-          Combine feeds and monitor the set of feeds for keywords or phrases. (”Gizmo” on ZDNet Blogs, VoIP Watch and Life Hacker)

-          Following conversations on blog posts – use ZapTXT with comments RSS feeds and receive notifications when new comments appear.

-          Auto discovery of feed from URL (for well formed feeds)

-          Share ZapTasks with colleagues or friends

-          Tag and Search Topic clouds for feed discovery

-          Publisher widget for blogs and sites that want to enable their users to opt-in to receive alerts on their content.

We here at the blog have been using it heavily as of late. We had another conference call last night, and many items were discussed. It is a very effective tool, and I encourage everyone to read over the list of 5 Skype Tips. Be sure to leave your comment there if you have more tips.

Technically Speaking, we take it a step further and hopefully will be having something new for everyone shortly.

Mr. Business Golf (Scot Duke) sent over a great review of the Pamela system, which all podcaster’s should take a look at. He did his latest Happy Hour show with it. His guest this time was none other then this blog’s Mae Oakmont. Below is his review of Pamela:

My review of the Free Version is very good.  Other than the degradation in the quality of the recording on the person I am talking to, everything seem to work very well.  I have not used all of the features; sound effects and whatever else is in some of the other windows, but the basics are there.  There also maybe something in the menu on setting the volumes. Of course who knows what the pay-for programs will offer?

I think it is a great tool. Definitely get and play with doing a recording before using like I did.  If I was to do it over I know I could have done a better job.  While looking into how to move the recordings out of Pamela into my audio editor I saw where there was some downloads of drivers that were available for MP3 encoding.  I did not find these until after I installed the program and made my recording.  I downloaded them but assume they will take place when I make another recording.

I could see getting the pay version if there is some improvement in the features. After getting over the initial WTF of doing my first phone SkyPe recording I would say that it is really straight forward and user friendly. Right now it looks like Pamela is growing and making some changes to their support site in anticipation of needing to provide online support.  SO, since I have not found anything to compare Pamela to I give it a four out of five stars just because I think they could do a much better job of providing tutorials and documentation on how to effectively use Pamela…they maybe doing that now, but there was nothing when I used it last night.  I would recommend it to podcaster as a needed tool.

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t given Business Golf a look, you really should. The book is a great place to start!