Make free calls from iPhone, courtesy Skype

Skype, the Internet telephone unit of eBay Inc, is planning to launch its service for iPhone users today and for BlackBerry users in May as part of its effort to expand beyond desktop computers.

Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.

Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durchslag said he has high hopes for the application's success on Apple Inc's popular iPhone as he expects Skype's most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to new and existing customers.

"The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There's a pent-up demand," Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service today.

In May it will launch Skype for Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, which popularized mobile email.

CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp's MySpace.

One of Skype's unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers to use the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need to duplicate lists.

"Whether you're Twitter, MySpace or Facebook you want to be embedded in the address book," said Wood. "This puts Skype firmly into the game."

Skype's iPhone application will be free to download and will allow free calls between Skype users. As with Skype on the desktop, fees will be charged for calls to traditional phones.

While Skype video is very popular with desktop customers, Durchslag said that the company is still considering whether it will offer video for the iPhone or other phones.

"We're considering video carefully but we have a really high bar on the quality," and how the user interaction will work with other applications on iPhone, he said. "If we do it we will have to do it incredibly well."

Karaoke on MySpace

Online social-networking titan MySpace on Sunday launched a karaoke service in Japan, expanding its amateur crooner channel to a nation rich with lovers of the pastime.

"If you had told me years ago we would launch an online karaoke site in Japan, I would have told you it is like selling ice to the Eskimos," said MySpace Karaoke general manager Nimrod Lev. "Boy was I wrong. It seems like the land of karaoke has nothing even close to that. We met with all the leading companies there and they loved what they saw."

MySpace Karaoke lays claim to being the world's "largest user-generated music service," logging more than eight million visitors since it launched in May of last year in Canada and the United States.

MySpace bills its online video recorder as innovative, custom-built technology that lets people record themselves singing by using computers equipped with microphones, web-cameras and Internet connections.

Users have submitted more than a million recordings of songs to the website, according to MySpace.

Workers at MySpace offices in Japan spent months tailoring the karaoke service to the local language.

"This was an extensive process," said Lev. "We had to adapt it to the smallest nuances of the Japanese language."

An estimated 40 percent of Japan's population, approximately 50 million people, do karaoke, according to statistics cited by MySpace.

Reuters-AFP

(China Daily 03/31/2009 page11)