Everything Basecamp has a short blurb about FIXED: Temporary database glitch. Jason called me up at 7 AM this morning (three hours after I went to bed) to tell me about it. Nothing unusual in that, programmers and system administrators are woken up in the middle of the night all the time.
Only Jason was calling from his Powerbook at 2 cents a minute. To my cell phone. In crystal crisp quality. In other words, Skype 1.0 is out for the Mac and SkypeOut freaking rocks. The quality was so good, I didn't even realize he was skyping me until long after the call.
Once more, that's lower-than-local rates for calling across the atlantic to normal phones. I'd start to worry if I was a telco living large off overpriced international calls. They're going to be 1, 2, 3, gone in no time at all.
While iChat AV is pretty darn cool and getting even cooler in Tiger, I can easily see Skype growing big and large in no time. Or, actually it is big and large at 54 million downloads. But bigger and larger then.
I especially like their voicemail feature. I'm not sure if its available to the general public yet, but my man on the inside of Skype hooked me up and it's super cool. It's just one more step to get push-to-talk and then it'll all get even more interesting.
I'd love to see recording of calls straight to MP3 as well. It would be a great way to record design conversations and then upload them to Basecamp for the team to share.
Direct to MP3 recording would be nice, right now I use Soundflower with Audio HiJack Pro to record my Skype conversations, but it needs to be Push-Of-A-Button Simple.
The problem with incorporating MP3 recording into Skype, is that MP3 is a licensed technology. Anybody incorporating MP3 encoding into a product, must pay a per user fee (between $2.50 and $5 I believe). So this would need to be a 'pro' version feature I suspect.
I think there is a common misconception that MP3 is an open standard, which is not the case. If you want open music formats, you are best to check-out the OGG standard by Vorbis
"Only Jason was calling from his Powerbook at 2 cents a minute. To my cell phone." WTF?!?
If your cell phone is really a cell phone (doh), I don't see how a SkypeOut call to Copenhagen could have cost him less than 30 cents (not 2 cents, I said 30!). I know that pretty well because it is what I am charged when calling my buddies' cell phones in Denmark with SkypeOut.
This also seems to be consistent with the Skype's rate page:
http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/all_rates.html?currency=USD#listing-D
Maybe Jason was a little bit too thrilled by the whole experience and forgot a zero somewhere?
You're right, it's the land line price that's 2 cent a minute.
Challenge by Will on February 04, 9:44
I have the same experience. When calling UK phones from the US I pay close to 50 cents a minute. As much as I like Skype, there is major lag at times, even when calling land lines or cell phones. This can only get better though.
