skype - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Microsoft waves goodbye to Lync, says hello to Skype for Business

  More than three years after acquiring Skype, Microsoft has announced it would rebrand its semi-rival Lync corporate communications platform as Skype for Business.
  

• Say goodbye to Microsoft Lync, hello to Skype for Business

  Microsoft is upgrading its Lync unified communication platform to look and feel more like the familiar consumer version of Skype and changing its name to Skype for Business.

• Microsoft launches wait list for Skype Translator preview

  Microsoft today started taking beta requests for its Skype Translator, the real-time translation technology and service Microsoft demonstrated earlier this year.

• Skype appears to bow to Indian rules, ends in-country calls to local networks

  Microsoft has decided to stop routing Skype Internet calls from within India to local landlines and mobile phones, in a move that may signal it is giving in to local regulations.

• MyNetFone charts course in app-dominated world

  The future of voice communications may be in 'over the top' applications, but there's life yet in the humble phone number according to the CEO of VoIP provider MyNetFone. Phone numbers "are this invisible glue that everyone takes for granted," Rene Sugo says.

• Opera grabs prime spot on Microsoft's Nokia X2, but searches go to Google

  Microsoft's newest Android smartphone, the Nokia X2, relies on Opera as the pre-installed default browser. But Opera defaults to using Google's search engine, not Microsoft's own Bing.

• Skype to retire 5-month old editions for Windows, Mac

  Skype plans to retire older versions of its desktop Internet calling application, including versions on Windows and OS X launched as recently as January and February of this year.

• A major mystery behind Microsoft's 'brain-like' speech-to-speech translator

  Speech-to-speech translation technology Microsoft is prepping for Skype has an unexplained capability: the more languages it learns, the better it becomes at the languages it learned first.

• Microsoft to live stream Build keynote today

  Microsoft will webcast the opening keynote address from its Build developers conference today starting at 8:30 a.m. PT (11:30 a.m. ET).

• Microsoft's Surface 2 challenges iPad with support for LTE broadband

  Users of Microsoft's Surface 2 tablet no longer need to be tethered to Wi-Fi networks for connectivity with the availability today of a new model that supports LTE broadband.

• Snowden revelations raise interest in smartphone spyware for business

  As the world still reels over reports of U.S. government surveillance of privately owned smartphones, a spyware industry is growing that's focused on helping employers monitor the ways smartphones and tablets are used by their workers. Parents are also interested in the service to track their children's smartphone use.

• Italian police investigate Skype use for 'porno blackmail'

  Italian police in Genoa have opened an investigation into the use of Skype to trap victims into online sexual indiscretions, which are recorded and used as a pretext for extortion.

• Skype-based malware shows how 'peculiar' malicious code can be

  Malware often does strange things, but this one -- which looked like Skype installed on a corporate domain controller -- was most "peculiar," says Jim Butterworth, a security expert at ManTech International, whose security subsidiary HBGary recently found the custom-designed remote-access Trojan on a customer's network.

• More top-tier Microsoft execs head to the exit

  Two of Microsoft's top executives will leave the company, including its head of marketing and the former CEO of Skype.

• Another executive shakeup at Microsoft

  Just a month after Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO the executive inner circle is being overhauled, with two key leaders leaving the company and a third assuming significant new power.