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It's been a while since a major Skype release, and on Wednesday, the eBay-owned VoIP communication service will issue the first of several planned version 4.0 beta builds for Windows that are anticipated to drop over the next few months.

The biggest changes to come with Skype 4.0 beta (download) are visual and organizational. For the first time, the program contains complete prompts for running sound and Webcam checks within the program set-up. After two failed tests buffered by common troubleshooting suggestions, Skype will recommend hardware--like headsets and a Webcam--to reverse incompatibility errors.

(Credit: Skype)

Redesigned interface
Skype 4.0 beta's redesigned interface may also get you blinking. Compared with its stable cousin, the new Skype beta's GUI has overflowed its banks, replacing tabs in the once-narrow interface with a second pane tacked on to the right. Four or five functions are flattened into this single window in an effort to make communications other than the voice chat staple easier to find and use. To wit, there's an IM bar deposited at the bottom of the communications pane and large buttons that prompt voice and video calls. Video calls are large by default, filling the program's communication activity pane.

Skype Out, the service offering competitive international rates for Skype users calling contacts' landlines instead of their computers, has also been chiseled out, by a large call-to-action button on the navigation bar. The button just below it opens a directory for finding people, businesses, and chat rooms. The toggle bar tucked away at the top switches from saved chat conversations to the contacts view, and rounds out the new additions.

Some functionality, like Skype Prime, will arrive in later builds.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Still more to come
Though there may be a placeholder for it, not every function in this first beta is live. The shop for Skype-approved hardware, while available from Skype.com, will not be activated in this iteration, nor will be the service on real-time advice, called Skype Prime. Automatic redial, call transferring, video presentations, and integration with Outlook contacts are also scheduled for roll-out in later builds.

The spread-out interface of Skype 4.0 beta for Windows will definitely take some getting used to, especially as it abandons the client's traditionally nimble, IM-styled build. However, it does succeed in calling out a wider array of communication services. This may give the Luxembourg-headquartered company a chance to deemphasize VoIP as its core competency and mark out new territory in Internet video, collaboration tools, and entertainment services.

As ambitious as Skype's new look and capabilities are, Mike Bartlett, the program's Windows product manager, confessed during our briefing that this design and the newly introduced features will be closely monitored for user backlash. It's likely that strong feedback from Skype's 309 million registered users will leave an impression on Skype 4.0 beta continues to take shape in the upcoming months.

Few people have played as big a role in recent tech booms and busts as Steve Jurvetson, managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, Calif.

One of the leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, Jurvetson is best-known for his involvement in Hotmail, Interwoven, Kana, and more recently, Skype. He spends his spare time building and firing rockets of all sizes with his young son, and recently has financed a new movie, The Singing Revolution, about his parent's tiny home country of Estonia.

CNET News.com reporters Michael Kanellos and Carl-Gustav Linden recently sat down with Jurvetson to discuss how the downturn in the broader economy will impact venture capital firms. The investor said he isn't concerned as there is no lack of new "disruptive" ideas that his firm is exploring.

The following is an edited and condensed version of the interview.

Steve Jurvetson says the pace of innovation keeps accelerating.

(Credit: Carl-Gustav Linden/CNET News.com)

How much has the downturn changed the environment for venture capital?
People say the venture market is up, or it is down, but it doesn't change that there are tons of entrepreneurs out there and their ideas keep floating. So we shouldn't ever imagine, as a prenatal, that the entrepreneurial pool is shrinking. There is a sort of a constant, and if anything, the pace of innovation keeps accelerating and the diversity of that innovation keeps growing.

I don't really care what the venture industry thinks. We try to be a bit more maverick: We want to invest in unique ideas that can change the world. We don't even care what industry they fall into, but ideally they're driven by some major disruptive force, as a different way of looking at the economy and venture opportunities. I know that 10 years from now we will be investing in something that relates to that.

If you look five years ahead, what do you see?
Over the next five years or so, there (will be) a lot of investment going on in emerging clean tech, and a number of them, like the electronics companies, will start to bear fruit. That's a smaller niche, one of the highlights of nanotech, creating new companies you did not even think about before.

But you don't talk about nanotech as an industry?
There is no business concept of nanotech. It doesn't describe the customer, and there's no synergy at the business level. The only synergy in the concept of nanotech is on the R&D technology level--researchers all over these disparate fields: biotech or biology and genetics, all the way to software to computer design.

Nanotech didn't disappear, it just went into the fabric of other industries, where the company that has got a nanotech solar cell, and if they're shipping a product they want to talk about a solar cell--they don't want to say, "Oh yeah, it's nano inside." But over half of our investments are in consumer Internet-related products, it's still the bulkhead, the stalwart investment category, it is the most consistent place to get a return on investment, we found.

The consumer market, on the other hand, seem so unpredictable. Why, say, is YouTube winning against other video-sharing sites?
Yeah, it's a thin line between stupid and clever. It's difficult to predict winners when there are 10 or 20 that you can identify. We've already invested in a peer-to-peer sharing video system years ago, and it is one of the stories that makes sense today, but it was way too early.

The cost of investing in these companies is very low. Does that mean you can make a lot of bets?
One of the reasons I think (Internet-related companies are) such a great place to invest is that the capital required to hit the market is much lower. Energy projects are much higher, and the same of course goes for pharmaceuticals. So the cost component is one. The second is network effects possible over the Internet; you can reach global customers like never before, so Skype is now 309 million users. I mean, measure that with a cost on a global basis to any traditional based model before the Internet.

The disruption point, in the case of Skype, in the case of Hotmail--is the most interesting one. They take existing businesses and turn them on their head, in terms of a business model. Hotmail was offering their product into a market that was used to paying for clients and servers, you paid five bucks a month for service for e-mail, as a separate bill item. Hotmail as a Web-based service changed forever the notion that it's just an application that runs on a network.

Skype is doing the same for VoIP. I mean we all remember the time when we paid our phone bill, we probably still do. I'm going to remember those crazy days in the 21st century when you actually paid a separate bill for a phone service. It's just an application, right?

But there is no way to say what consumers will buy and for how long they will buy it?
If I want to make a product that is appealing to consumers, like a piece of clothing or a video game, that's fad driven. Some companies do it and I don't know how they do it, but it's generally a bad place to invest.

But 25 years ago, couldn't Apple have been seen as one of those one-hit companies?
Would we invest in a new start-up where (Apple CEO Steve) Jobs would be at the head? We have been less enamored with consumer hardware, to try to build a device, be it a new recorder or a Segway, Palm Pilots, that have been venture backed. I say give it 10 years and they're going to be gone. Apple is the one counter example of a start-up doing consumer-facing hardware that is still around 20 years later--or stays a billion dollar company for a long period of time.

What you have instead are the flash-in-the-pan phenomena where they just don't get the next product generation, they don't have enough capital or resources to be able to compete with the big guys. And it comes back to why does a start-up ever exist? If there isn't anything disruptive in the market then the big companies have huge advantages.

Apple is maybe one of those examples; they launched during a disruptive foundation of the PC industry. That's classic for a start-up, But why are they still able to introduce new products that are innovative and world-beating in all these markets? That's very unusual. (Hewlett-Packard) was celebrated for a while when they were doing the printer business as one of their core businesses, and they were looked at as a exception from the general rule of no innovation from big companies. Now Apple is looked to as the hero for all big companies everywhere to say, "Wow , we can be like Apple, right?"

But HP is doing well.
HP is doing well, but I wouldn't say they're innovative; they just do what big companies do well. I would say that HP today is doing well in the same sense (as) most other big companies, same strategies: dominate the market, use supply power on sourcing of component costs, and be in really big markets and be No. 1 in those markets.

You have taken some nice rocket photos (which can be viewed here). When are you going to go commercial on rockets?
We have heard pitches from maybe three rocketry companies. My partners have encouraged me to look a little bit more into them. There is definitely some innovation going on in motors and in composite materials. And there is one really cool one, I can't speak so much about it, out there that I really like. They've figured out a way to electrically control solid fuel repellent, and that's been one of the biggest nemesis of solids. I mean solid boosters are great but once you light them you can't turn them off, you can't throttle them like a liquid fuel. But I think a rocket investment would have to have some non-rocketry application to really get big enough.

But isn't it more interesting now when NASA wants to establish a base on the moon?
...And there's the Google prize (a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon) and all. Oh yeah, but we don't like regulatory environment, we don't like highly capital intensive businesses. If you hold it up against a Skype or a Hotmail then, gosh, I can put $2 million in here or $200 million there, which one should I rather do? I could make 100 $2 million bets."

The "new" PSP Skype Headset

(Credit: Amazon)

When we reviewed the Sony PSP Headset a few months ago, we determined that it worked perfectly fine with the console's newly enabled Skype feature--so long as you scrounged up the accessory extension cable needed to enable the two-way communication function. The problem was that the headset didn't include the cable: you needed to buy another set of Sony headphones--the PSP earbuds--just to get the included cable. It was one of those corporate catch 22s that seems to be par for the course in the world of consumer electronics.

Thankfully, Sony has finally addressed the issue. The Sony Skype Headset Kit for PSP bundles the headset and the remote extension cable into one package, all for a tidy $30. Another advantage: the extension cable is now black instead of white, so it matches both the headset and the color scheme of most PSPs. It's available now at a variety of online retailers, including Amazon and Buy.com. For Skype users who are always toting their PSPs through Wi-Fi-friendly environs, it's a pretty good deal. Just remember that the headset--and the Skype functionality--only work on newer PSP 2000 ("slim PSP") models, not the original PSP units.

Source: Amazon via Gizmodo

Updated April 21, 5:36 AM PDT to reflect the actual announcement by Skype.

Skype on Monday said it is now offering unlimited calls from the U.S. to phones in a wide range of international locations.

For $9.95 per month, callers will be able to ring folks abroad in 34 countries, including many in Europe, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. (The details of the new flat-rate subscriptions were first published in an Associated Press story Sunday evening.) There is one limit--in most of those countries, the calls must be to a landline.

Calls to cell phones abroad are allowed under the $9.95 price only to Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The plan also allows unlimited domestic calls in the U.S., via Skype's Internet-based phone service, to both landline phones and mobile phones.

In December 2006, Skype began offering unlimited calls to cell phones and landlines in the U.S. and Canada at $29.95 per year.

Skype, a unit of e-commerce giant eBay, expects to hit $500 million in revenue this year, and profits have been strong. Still, eBay is giving the service a hard look and may consider selling it, if the "synergies" don't work out favorably.

More details on the calling plans
The company's Monday morning announcement laid out three new subscription plans for consumers in the U.S. and Canada, as follows:

•Unlimited U.S. and Canada: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada. ($2.95 per month)

•Unlimited Mexico: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada, and to landlines in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey; up to 80 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to landlines in the rest of Mexico and up to 40 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to all Mexico cell phones. ($5.95 per month)

•Unlimited World: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in 34 countries (see the cell-phone exception noted earlier in the story), including the U.S. and Canada, as well as to Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey; up to 80 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to the rest of Mexico landlines and up to 40 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to all Mexico cell phones. ($9.95 per month)

Skype notes that calls to premium, nongeographic, and other special numbers are excluded. The company continues to offer Skype-to-Skype calls free of charge.

Has eBay about had it with Skype?

New eBay CEO John Donahoe told the Financial Times the online auctioneer will consider selling Skype if it can't find a way to make the service better help eBay's e-commerce business.

"What we're testing this year are the synergies," Donahoe told the Financial Times. "If the synergies are strong, we'll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we'll reassess it."

Donahoe did say Skype is doing well. It generated $126 million in the first quarter, up 61 percent from a year ago. This year, it's expected to generate $500 million in revenue and be profitable. Overall, first-quarter eBay revenues reported Wednesday were up 24 percent from a year ago to $2.19 billion. Profit was $460 million, up 22 percent from the same quarter a year ago.

But the question about Skype, which eBay acquired for $2.5 billion in 2005, has never been whether it's a decent business, it's whether it's a good fit for eBay. By the end of the year, the company will finally be closer to that answer.

eBay announced Wednesday its second straight $2 billion quarter and said its first-quarter revenue was up 24 percent from a year ago.

The auction giant said that it brought in Q1 revenue of $2.19 billion, up 24 percent from the $1.77 billion it brought in during the same period a year earlier. In addition, the company's Q1 profit of $460 million, or 34 cents a share, was up 22 percent from its Q1 2007 earnings of $377 million, or 27 cents.

In a release, eBay attributed its strong quarter to several factors, including global business classifieds, growth at its Skype and PayPal units, and "net transaction revenues" from Marketplaces.

Among the milestones eBay trumpeted for the quarter were 100 billion total Skype-to-Skype minutes, 3 million total vehicles sold on eBay motors, and the repurchase of 37 million shares of eBay common stock for about $1 billion.

It's also somewhat ironic that eBay it touting its success with Skype when for some time the common wisdom has been that its much-hyped acquisition of the VoIP company had been viewed as a failure.

Also during the quarter, John Donahoe assumed the CEO position, succeeding longtime leader Meg Whitman.

The Vikings sailed in small open wooden ships to discover America long before Columbus. Their 21th century counterparts, the Silicon Vikings, prefer business class when they travel the Atlantic.

The $2.6 billion acquisition of the Swedish IP phone company Skype by eBay in 2005 and Sun Microsystems' recent purchase of Swedish-Finnish open-source database company MySQL for $1 billion has raised hopes among Nordic investors that more big deals for VC-backed Nordic companies could be in the pipeline in the U.S.

(Credit: Silicon Vikings)

And the Vikings have a lot of cash. Venture capital firms from Sweden and Finland-- the Norwegians prefer to drill for oil and gas instead--had a record year in funding in 2007.

"The venture capital in Finland is growing very fast--2007 was the best year ever for fundraising," said Krista Rantasaari, secretary general of the Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA). She participated in a panel Wednesday of Nordic VC experts organized by the Silicon Vikings business network.

Together, Finnish venture capital firms collected new funds to the tune of $2.44 billion, most of it pension fund money. In Sweden, the sum was much larger, as the country belongs to the top slot for venture capital in Europe--$6.11 billion was raised for new investments. This means a lot of fresh money has to be put to work, despite fears that a downward business curve also will affect Europe.

Says Blomquist: "This recession will not be a solely U.S. phenomena." According to surveys, Swedish and Finnish VC companies are prepared to invest as much as in 2006 and 2007. Their eyes will be set on the horizon for later exits and for companies that might be ready for IPOs or buyouts when the credit crisis has blown over.

The venture firms are putting their bets on entrepreneurs with global ambitions. "We would never invest in a company that only has a Nordic strategy," said Daniel Blomquist, associate at Creandum Advisor in Stockholm, Sweden, during at the meeting at Stanford University.

With deep dark clouds gathering in the financial skies, people in the VC business still believe Silicon Valley is the place to be. There is very little Nordic capital invested directly in the Valley, where at this moment there is no shortage of capital available for start-up funding. The general trend is that Nordic VCs help start-up companies establish themselves in the U.S., preferably by setting up their head office here.

"Our best cases have had an aggressive entrepreneur who took the step and brought family and bags over," says Linus Lindberg of Vision Capital, which is based in Geneva and Burlingame, Calif.

One of the few funds bringing in Viking capital is Nexitventures, with offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Stockholm; and Helsinki, Finland. Nexitventures has a new fund with a first closing of 50 million euros ($76 million) and hopes to bring in as much as 150 million euros ($230 million) in the final closing stage. The capital is earmarked for early-stage companies in mobile and wireless technology.

According to Nexitventures partner David Aslin, economic troubles can actually help start-ups as big layoffs make it easier to hire new people and service providers, such as lawyers, will be cheaper.

"It could get easier to build, easier to start a company," Aslin said.

Choose from 18 different games.

Facebook is quickly becoming a way for established software publishers and services to gain new market share. Today Skype (for Windows and Mac) slipped an app launcher for 18 games into Facebook's app directory. I might mention that the games already exist as Skype Extras. Not only will the new app advertise this content to a fresh audience, the third party developers who provide Skype their games can also win new followers.

The single- and multiplayer games include bowling, Sudoku, Russian checkers, and backgammon. I launched the bowling game from Facebook, which opened the Extras Manager on Skype's app (which must be running in order to use the service) and it instructed me to choose an opponent from my buddy list.

The match proceeded as it would have had I plucked it from Skype's interface, which is to say it was a fun, engaging experience that took full advantage of Skype's all-in-one services to chat while "rolling," speak over VoIP, interact with a friend, and send screen shots via file transferring. But did I really need the Facebook app?... Read more

(Credit: Crave UK)

Today Skype and 3 announced a mobile phone that will allow users to make free Skype-to-Skype calls and send free instant messages over 3G, in addition to making normal phone calls and browsing the Internet.

3's Skype phone also packs a 2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, an expandable micro SD card slot (up to 1GB) and weighs a pocket-friendly 85g. The star feature however, has to be the ability to make cheap Skype calls.

You can call friends or relatives anywhere in the world via Skype and not spend a penny, or have to be tied up to a laptop or PC--we like.

According to 3's press agency, this handset is much more integrated with Skype and easier to use than previous Skype-running handsets, such as 3's X-Series range of phones, but we'll wait for a proper hands-on to make any final judgments.

The Skype phone will be available next month and cost 50 pounds (about $103) on pay-as-you-go, or free on a monthly contract. Skype-to-Skype calls will be free on contract, but you'll need to top up your credit every month to get free calls on pay-as-you-go.

(Source: Crave UK)