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I have been involved in voice and video communication on the PC for a long, long time..back to the original Internet Phone technology in the 90s. I have been involved professionally with several of the early innovators in the space, and today I would say VoIP is one of my most commonly used technologies. I use it for at least three quarters of my overall daily communication, and all of it from work.

That being said, I am extremely excited by the release of the beta for Skype v4, which is supposed to start rolling out sometime today/tomorrow NOW. Skype is a great program and one which I find more or less indispensable both professionally and personally..and v4 sounds like it is going to be a useful, gutsy release for the company. The new version seems to be a major step forward for Skype, but technically and philosophically.

In a nutshell, the core Skype software, which was created for the voice dominated environment of a couple years back, is being retooled to focus on video and video/voice/text integration which are the key ingredients of today’s online communication landscape.

When Skype was first launched, webcams were still somewhat rare, quite expensive and generally crappy. Voice was the big deal then and video was a nice add on. Now they are ubiquitous. In fact, you need to work to find a laptop that doesn’t come with a basic one built in, and even on that barebones cam the quality isn’t terrible. Top of the line cams, such as my Logitech Pro 9000, are simply too good for most video chat software to support properly. Skype v4 intends to change that by putting video chat quality and ease front and center in the new version.

In addition to more video focus, it seems that Skype is moving away from a focus on address books and grouping things more by conversations, much the way that gmail treats email as threads rather then individual mail. This also indicates a realization by the developers that Skype is being used for a lot of group conferencing and collaboration.

All in all, I am far more hyped about THIS release then that Fire-whatever it was.

Some other nice new features include:

• The ability to import address books from various other applications like Outlook and Yahoo (but not Gmail yet, which could be a problem for many of us…hopefully some workaround will present itself)
• Improved auto detection of new mics and cams
• Improved tools for testing video/sound quality

Download the Skype v4 beta (when it is available) HERE.

UPDATE: It is now available at the link above…download at will.

Below is a briefing by Skype President Josh Silverman and other company leaders on the new direction of the software.

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).