Tag Archives: skype

Skype: Why not build an Expert Directory?

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Today Skype officially launched its Skype in the Classroom community. It’s a directory where teachers from around the world can connect with fellows based on mutual criteria such as class size, topic and location. The project has been in beta since December and already attracted more than 4000 teachers.

I think this is a great initiative, bringing teachers and their students together to learn from and with each other. Nevertheless I ask myself why something like this does not exist in the for profit space. I believe it could be beneficial for Skype and online teachers.

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Monday Roundup: Skype, Salman Khan, Woz and Mark Ecko

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In today’s Monday Roundup we take a look at Skype’s final plans to display advertisements in the client,  Salman Khan’s presentation at TED, Steve Wozniak’s appeal to educators to be brave and use new technology and Mark Ecko’s fight against corporal punishment in schools which is still legal in 20 of the States in the US and, even more shocking, still very widely used by educators.

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Quoi? Skype illegal in France?

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Today, I learned something really interesting. It seems as if Skype is not respecting French law and therefore is “illegally operating” in France. At least, that’s according to the blog Tic et Net of the French magazine L’Express.

It is not about the VoIP from PC to PC that is causing those legal implications but about the SkypeOut service which needed to be declared as a telecommunication service provider in France. But Skype have apparently refused to do so.

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R:ED January 31st to February 5th 2011

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  1. Skype To Hire 350 People in 2011
  2. LibreDigital Raises $4 Million For Digital Reading Technologies
  3. Tablets Rekindle Our Love of Reading–Books, Too
  4. HarperCollins Plans To Publish Novel Submitted To Social Network for Teen Writers
  5. Justin.tv To Launch Social Video-Sharing App
  6. Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities
  7. Foursquare’s University Badges Now Available at All Colleges & Universities
  8. Make the Internet Smarter at Helping Us
  9. THE UNEARNED FOLLOW: Here’s Why The Cool Kids Always Get The Most Followers
  10. Google Launches Street View for Museums
  11. InternMatch Raises $400K To Help Students Find The Perfect Internship
  12. Teacher-Replacing Tech: Friend or Foe?
  13. With Clever UI, Readability Hopes to Please Readers Into Paying More
  14. What Ricky Gervais’s Bruising Comedy Teaches About Innovation
  15. Can the Ad Industry Save Education?
  16. Anybots Releases Segway-Style Telepresence Robot
  17. Kno shipments delayed, no word on why or for how long
  18. An Android Tablet Made Just for School
  19. iPhone App Raises Questions About Who Owns Student Inventions
  20. Why the Web Is Useless in Developing Countries – And How to Fix It
  21. Tango Takes Face-To-Face Video Calling Beyond The iPhone With 8 Million Downloads
  22. Rounds.com Adds Some Chatroulette To Its Facebook App, With A Twist
  23. Did Demand Media IPO Just in Time?

R:ED January 23rd to January 29th 2011

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  1. Vid.ly Makes Streaming Video Work on Any Device
  2. Kno Is Looking For Student Ambassadors And Are Paying In Hefty Tablet Discounts
  3. BlipSnips Adds Enhanced Tagging And Captioning To Facebook Videos
  4. TransferWise wants to be the Skype of currency exchange
  5. MoshiMonsters launches first toy range, aims at $22 billion US market
  6. Tinychat Raises $1.5M From Kutcher, Diddy And Others, Is Just Getting Started
  7. $2-Billion Federal Program Could Be ‘Windfall’ for Open Online Learning
  8. Google Apps Marketplace Gets An Education Category
  9. The Future According to Schmidt: “Augmented Humanity,” Integrated Into Google
  10. Babylon Aims to Be the Quora of Translation
  11. Babylon Aims To Build A “Quora For Linguistics” Off Its 72 Million Members
  12. Report: Skype Delays IPO Until Second Half Of 2011 To Build Up More Revenue
  13. McGraw Hill Gets In On the Mobile Education Market
  14. Is Facebook Testing Voice Chat? [PIC]
  15. E-Readers in Africa: Non-Profit Brings Thousands of Books to Ghanaian Children
  16. YC-Backed Tutorspree Is An Airbnb For Tutoring
  17. Your Professor, Your Computer, and You
  18. Tennessee’s Webb School makes iPads mandatory, still looks down on note-passing

Dimdim got Acquired – WiZiQ invites Refugees

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So, the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) company Salesforce bought the web conferencing platform Dimdim for $31 million USD in cash.

Right after the announcement of the deal, Dimdim changed its landing page stating that they won’t accept new clients anymore, the old clients could use the service during the transition period until March 15th as they had done before. After that period the service will shut down completely as it seems.

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2011 – The Year of the Video Call?

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In 2010 we saw happening a lot and I still have to catch up with everything for myself. It seems as if the 12 months were 24 or 36, so much innovation happening in such a short period of time.

One topic that came up during the year was of course Skype. All the features and upgrades to this service alone show how quickly the tech sector is moving forward and also how quickly we learned to adapt ourselves to new trends. Last week, Skype officially launched their new iPhone app. I believe this is going to be a breach in the dike of how people will communicate.

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R:ED December 5th 2010 to January 1st 2011

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  1. More Details On Skype’s Big Move To The Web
  2. State Department Warns Students Against Discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook, Twitter
  3. Interview with Sean Conway of Notehall
  4. Skype Creates Bespoke Software to Help Refugee Workers
  5. Test Prep App Startup Watermelon Express Raises Funding From Groupon Co-Founders
  6. Little Bookrenter Is Narrowing The Gap With Chegg
  7. World Map Of Social Networks Shows Facebook’s Ever-Increasing Dominance
  8. Watch an Apple Engineer Recreate a 2,000-Year-Old Computer Using Legos
  9. Digital Learning Now
  10. KHAN ACADEMY IN THE CLASSROOM, DAYS 1 AND 2
  11. Flat World Knowledge Expands Beyond Business Curriculum with Affordable College Textbooks for General Education Courses
  12. ooVoo Releases Android App for Six-Way Video Chat
  13. Why Your Smartphone Will Replace Your Wallet
  14. Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.
  15. Kobo Looks to Social Reading to Distinguish It From Kindle
  16. How Twitter Users Changed in 2010 [CHARTS]
  17. 81% of Gen Yers Use Facebook Daily [STUDY]
  18. Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
  19. FitFu Wants To Get You Exercising At Your Desk, And Everywhere Else
  20. Google Ventures Gives $600K to iOS App Maker Miso Media
  21. Mint.com Hits The Books; Offers Personal Finance Curriculum To Students
  22. Language Learning Service Voxy Closes Another 600K, For A Total Of $1.2 Million
  23. Send & Receive Money From Twitter & Facebook Friends With Dwolla
  24. Huge Growth Projected for Tablet PCs [REPORT]
  25. Virtual Holiday Dinner Brings Families Together via Robot Proxies
  26. Massive Change Ahead in Middle East: Women Control $700 Billion and Counting
  27. Fair Trade Shopping Site Worldstock.com Profits Without Trying
  28. 2011 TED Fellow Studies Tech Needs in Low-Income India–and Builds a Braille Phone in His Spare Time
  29. 5 E-Book Trends That Will Change the Future of Publishing
  30. Why the Kids Don’t Blog and Grandma’s on Facebook
  31. Skype’s New App Brings Video Chat To The iPhone, iPad And iPod Touch
  32. Why iPad Magazine Sales Are Not As Bad As They Seem
  33. Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America’s Lunch
  34. Unhappy Helicopter Parents
  35. 65% of Internet Users Paid for Digital Content [STUDY]
  36. So Much For FREE!: Apple Will Sell $2B in Apps in 2011
  37. The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

Mingleverse raises $1.4 million for Marketing and Mobile

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Mingleverse, the Canadian startup that is a mix of VoIP chat and Second Life raised another $1.4 million to expand their marketing efforts and integration into social networks and mobile devices.

I first wrote about Mingleverse in November 2009 and titled the post “Mingleverse – The Missing Link?”. So let’s see what has happened in the past twelve months.

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R:ED October 24th to November 6th

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  1. What does the $15,000 Anybot tell us about the future of telecommuting?
  2. Connect Any Wi-Fi Device to Any Other Wi-Fi Device with Wi-Fi Direct
  3. The Stampede: Razorfish Reveals Latin America’s Untapped Digital Consumer
  4. Inkling Debuts Interactive iPad Textbook Experience With Photography App
  5. How A Mixergy Listener Got Sal Khan His DotCom!
  6. RediLearning Closes $1.75 Million For Systems To Train Senior Care Workers
  7. Survey Says: Men More Likely Than Women To Use Skype Or Mobile VoIP Apps

Did Video Calling finally reach Critical Mass?

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According to the latest Pew report it seems to be the case. In the report you can find that about 20% of Americans have at least once used a video calling feature on the PC or their mobile phone.

And today we learned that Skype 5.0 finally got the full Facebook implementation. This could actually be the tipping point for video calls becoming mainstream which would be of course very benefitial for live online language courses. Fast Company is already seeing 40% of Americans using video call at the end of next year.

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R:ED August 29th to September 4th

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  1. Fora.TV Triples Traffic. Wait, That Many People Want Hour-Long Videos on Economics?
  2. Skype Introduces 10-Way Video Calling
  3. EverFi Raises $11 Million For Financial Literacy Education Application
  4. Textbook Rentals Go Into Hypergrowth: Bookrenter Says Revenues Are Growing 725 Percent
  5. Udemy Scores $1M In Seed Funding, Aims To Democratize Online Learning
  6. 15 Essential Back to School Podcasts
  7. Vidyo Bets On The iPad And iPhone For The Future Of Video Conferencing
  8. comScore: Time Spent Watching Live Web Video Up 650 Percent
  9. Rise of the Anti-Content Farmers
  10. The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You

R:ED August 22nd to August 28th

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  1. College Curriculum Requires Undergrads to Play Video Game “Portal”
  2. Seth Godin Gives Up on Traditional Book Publishing
  3. Skype Etiquette
  4. Why Social Media Projects Fail – A European Perspective
  5. Facebook Trademark Lawsuit Aims to Limit Use of “Book” by Others
  6. Hey Facebook, Here Are Some Other Companies You Can Bully Or Sue
  7. Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word “Face”? (And Guess Who Is Trying To Stop It?)
  8. Kanji Amnesia And Why It’s Okay To Forget Kanji
  9. Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Thoughts on Skype Going Public

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Skype has filed for an initial public offering aiming to raise $100 million USD. That would be a nice pile of money to fill the war chest for the upcoming fights with smaller providers like Fring and of course Apple’s FaceTime.

The question for us is of course: will this have any effect on the current business model, e.g. will the service stay free.

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Pimp Your Skype – with Dabbleboard

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Hello Ladies and Gents. May I introduce myself. My name is Kay Alexander and from today on I will write on this blog about tools and tricks for online teachers. Why? Because I can.

Joking aside, some might already know me as co-founder of the E-Teachers Academy. I am the business partner of Kirsten Winkler for a long, long time and the tech guy of the Winkler web estate. I work with computers (yes work, not play) since I was fourteen or fifteen and connected myself to the pre form of the internet with a 2400 baud modem. Since this time I live online.

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review:ed #4.1 with Dave Schappell – iPhone 4, FaceTime and Skype

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In the fourth episode of review:ed, the show where a changing guest and I talk about recent news in online education, tech and funding, Dave Schappell the Founder and CEO of TeachStreet made his second appearance.

In the first part of the show Dave and I talked about the recent launch of the iPhone 4 and of course FaceTime.

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Virtual Classroom vs Skype / VoIP only – Round #4 #5 #6

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4) Greater availability
Some countries ban Skype (i.e. UAE), some learners prefer MSN or Yahoo and many companies do not allow Skype for security reasons.
(Giselle Santos, AmericanTeacher, Heike Philp)

5) Conferences
Conference like the ETCon would not have been possible on Skype.
(unknown)

6) Plan B as in ‘back-up’
Internet communication technology is fragile and it is advised to always have two of everything. So, it is good to use MSN AND Skype or Skype AND Virtual Classroom. If one fails, one can use the other.
(Heike Philp)

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Three Years of Resistance – Why I will finally buy an iPhone

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Finally. After over three years of resistance I will buy my first iPhone when it will hit the market in France. This time Steve Jobs got me on the right nerve, FaceTime.

Of course there are other nice features like the new display, the smaller size etc that turns the iPhone 4 into a decent replacement for my Asus EEE netbook which I now use when I am not at home but I truly think that FaceTime could be a massive game changer.

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