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Guest Editor – Neil Barrett-Bowen, digital content manager for Skype

By way of introduction, my name is Neil Barrett-Bowen and I work for the Skype ecommerce team as the digital content manager for Skype. Over the next few months I will be working with SDP to focus on generating revenue opportunities for Skype extras.

As an outsider coming into this project, my first observation would be that I think SDP and Easybits have achieved an incredible feat by delivering a new extras platform while the Skype 3.0 release was continually changing. The result has been that the extra’s have gone from being an obscure after thought to an integrated part of Skype. This enhancement to the Skype Client has been warmly received by Skype Users with over 4.2 million downloads to date.

So now that the platform has been delivered we are starting to learn what works and what is generating revenue. The early results have been interesting and here are some of my thoughts on what seems to make a popular extra:

• User experience is king
• Integrate with Skype
• Offer a free version
• Pay attention to user rating.
• It just works!
• It's fun!

Read more about Premium and Featured criteria

Technical updates: What is new in the Developer Zone?

Developers event : Open day at Skype London office

We have some exciting news if you are a developer building applications for Skype.

Since launching Skype 3.0 in December over 5 million 3rd party applications have been downloaded.
If you’re a developer Skype would like to invite you to an open day to learn more about the opportunities for developers building Skype enabled applications and share beer and pizza with some of our existing members of the developer community.

The event will be held on the 22nd March at 2:30pm to 9pm within Skype’s office at Tottenham Court Road in London.

A full agenda will be posted on our developer zone website
The event is free but spaces are limited so you must act now to register your interest in attending.To attend please email to our Newsletter editor with:

• Your name
• Your company
• Your location
• Are you an existing Skype developer? (Y/N)

As spaces are extremely limited you will receive an email with confirmation of your attendance.
We look forward to meeting with you.

Regards, Lester

Apply now and meet the Skype team

Skype and Software partners survey

Hello!

At Skype our main focus is providing our users with the best communications experience possible when using Skype. Our developer community and the businesses responsible for creating ideas have helped Skype work towards continued innovation and delivering this promise to our users.

So...

To develop further services for the Developer and Business Development communities, Skype would like to understand a bit more about you and how we can best help to facilitate your requests with both our technical teams and business development teams moving forward.

Please take some time to answer our survey. Your feedback and input are welcomed.

Antoine at Skype

Fill in our questionnaire!

Business case: Bertorello's an Extra-Skype relationships

This is the year of the Buck for Skype, and I am not referring to the springer spaniel dog in our office in Buenos Aires. As user traction for Extras gets there, skySpace is tracking to surpass one million downloads.

Certain "channel owners" have emerged who now must blaze the trail to monetization to further value-add their innovation alongside Skype. Some early leaders, EasyBits in gaming, Unyte in screen sharing, and Bertorello's skySpace in media-centric social networking must all conduct revenue generation experiments to find the best path to mutual profitability.

At Bertorello we believe that for any business model to succeed, it essential for skySpace to reach massive viral adoption within the entire Skype user base, then extending to an eBay user/world domination-type scenario. Otherwise, neither Skype/eBay nor the resident Extras will be satisfied the financial outcome--leaving the developer program in perilous waters. Obviously, complete adoption will not happen unless Extras are contextually integrated into the Skype/eBay software and website experience.

Read more about skySpace, an Extra for Skype

Please visit the Bertorello's Website and download

Mac update: new API example

Updated Skype.framework.

The most significant change is that sendSkypeCommand now returns info synchronously whenever possible. Previously sendSkypeCommand didn't return anything. All information from Skype was delivered by asynchronous callback skypeNotificationReceived.

In addition, the communication between Skype.framework and Skype is much faster now. Previously, if you called sendSkypeCommand a lot of times in a short period of time (for example 100+ times a second), then sometimes Skype became unresponsive for a few seconds. This was caused by the slowness of asynchronous callback mechanism. For example, if your application asks a property of all the contacts in the contact list (mood message or display name etc) at startup, then you should definitely use the new Skype.framework.

There is also an important bugfix: isSkypeAvailable returned YES even when user had signed out.

Download the Mac example

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