David Marcucci's Doorstep » skype

Skypes Story: Who not to invest with.

David Marcucci — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:00:02 +0000

Here is a little follow up to my last post about Skype. It appears the people involved in the purchasing of Skype are dumber than I first thought. They bought Skype thinking they were getting one of the leaders in p2p voip today and really all they got was the application. Not only did they not buy the intellectual property, they didn’t even get the source. So what can they do to enhance and build upon the current Skype solution? Change the logo, maybe? They better check with the trademarks office first, maybe they didn’t even get that!

So get a list of all the people involved in these transactions (on the buying side) and never, ever invest with those people.

Source: New Lawsuit Brings Clarity To Skypes IP Problem Prognosis: Screwed – washingtonpost.com.

Looking for VOIP on the cheap, don’t invest too much in SKYPE

David Marcucci — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:09:30 +0000

I’ve seen this pop up a couple times on the interwebs so I figured I’d give it a read. Well, it appears when eBay bought SKYPE, that free VOIP service that everyone uses, it looks like they forgot to cross their T’s and dot their I’s. Seems they basically bought the name and only “licensed” the technology, just like you “license” your anti-virus software. So their equilivant of your “Subscription Expired” popup you get from Norton each year is popping up in their legal department.

What does this mean for you? The short story is Skype may go away and if you own a Skype phone or have Skype credit it may become useless. So if you bought stuff already, oh well, if you haven’t don’t. Wait and see what happens. Maybe eBay will “license” the technology again and all will be saved, for a little while.

Finally, and I can’t post without offering an alternative, sign up for Google voice and Gizmo5 (http://google.com/voice and http://gizmo5.com) and you can replace Skype. You’ll be able to call land lines, Skype users, and other Gizmo5 users. It’s the solution I am using now and best of all it’s free too.

Reference: Skype As We Know It May Not Exist Much Longer, eBay Says

Product Review – D-Link Skype USA Phone Adapter (DPH-50U)

David Marcucci — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:05:09 +0000

I thought I would start adding some “product reviews” since I do try out a fair amount of products and services. I decided to pick the last product I purchased, the Skype USB Phone Adapter – DPH-50U by D-Link.This little device allows you to hook up a standard phone to you computer via a USB adapter. The adapter has a pass through for your regular phone line so you can use the phone for both regular calls and skype calls.

The one issue I had, and I guess It’s my fault for not looking, is that the device is not compatable with Vista 64bit. So after plugging it into my Vista 32bit machine I was able to install the drivers and it basically just worked. There was no complicated setup and the lastest version of Skype seemed to integrate with it perfectly.

I had read that the device would allow you to call your computer at home via skype and basically “route” your call out to the phone line. This was the main reason I bought the device, however, I was unable to see any configuration that appeared to allow you to do that. I didn’t open the manual becasuse after discovering the device was non-64bit compatable I basically gave up on the whole routing out calls thing.

So based on it’s limited functionaliy and the fact that it only cost me $5 I am giving it a “so-so” rating. I may use it again but for now it sits here taking up space.