Our user experience research team needs the help of UK businesses to shape the future of our business products and features.

In their continual drive to improve our products they’d like to visit your premises for half a day and conduct interviews with a selection of Skype users and decision makers, and observe how Skype is used in your business. Data collected will be strictly confidential and not shared or used for any purposes other than improving Skype for Business.

Your feedback has the potential to influence design changes, new features and product offerings. We’ll also offer compensation of €200 of Skype Credit (or equivalent in Pounds Sterling) for your time.

If you’re interested in participating please complete this form.

Keira Knightley in a TV interview – photo by moonhouse.

When Rupert Friend was asked how he and Keira Knightley keep in touch when they’re on location in far flung places, his response was an emphatic:

“We use Skype – old school!”

A Skype video call is the key to their often long-distance relationship, according to articles in mypark and OK.

Still, ‘old school’ isn’t bad for a five-year-old piece of software, eh?

Our buddies at 3 have put together a nifty Facebook app which lets you find out which of your Facebook friends are using Skype.

Simply add the app to your profile, tell it your Skype name, invite your friends to add it too, and it’ll tell you which of them are Skype users – it’s a great way to expand your Skype contact list.

You never know, there might be a few surprises in there – you could end up having a video call with a long-lost university friend, or catching up with a business contact by instant message. And with hundreds of thousands of people signing up to Skype every day, you’ll be able to spot them as soon as they join

Some of you may remember the video we made to show off the video features of Skype 4.0 for Windows.

Our friends at Poke and Flynn helped us put together the final video, but they also managed to sneak a quick look behind the scenes and catch up with our resident Rubik’s Cube genius.

He’s responsible for all of the Rubik’s Cube action you see in the video – and the photos below might help you figure it all out

Faking it

Hand make-up

Hand model

On set

Later this summer, 3 will be introducing a new SIM, priced at just £1.99, which will bring free Skype-to-Skype calls to anyone in the UK with an unlocked compatible phone – all you’ll have to do is pop the SIM in, download Skype from 3, and you’ll be free to make as many Skype-to-Skype calls as you like without worrying about cost.

In the UK, Skype users already make 1.5 million minutes of calls on the 3 network every day – and with these improvements on their way, you’ll soon have no excuse not to join them

Update: there’s some more information on the 3 UK website.

For those of you reading this in an RSS reader, you can watch the video here. You can also grab the embed code if you want to use this video in your own blog.

Until now, Skype hasn’t done much in the way of advertising. Readers like you have been spreading the word, people have written nice things about us in the papers, but in Europe we’ve never done something as daring as renting a billboard or the back page of a magazine.

So, it might come as a bit of a surprise to discover that Skype’s taking its first steps into the world of TV advertising – and in case you haven’t caught a glimpse of it already, take a look at the clip above

Watch the video stream live (English, Windows Media format)

Our friends at Albion, who made the banners for us, have just blogged about how they made them. 18 hours a day for three days solid, and 50 packs of blue Fimo later, and some beautiful little clips emerged.

There are a bunch of fantastic prizes to be won, including (of course) a 3 Skypephone S2, so head over to their site and help support two very worthwhile causes.

It’s been a week now since the UK launch of the Three INQ¹ phone, and there’s been plenty of discussion of the new handset in the blogosphere. It’s based on the same platform as the 3 Skypephone, and so has the same level of Skype integration – you can call your contacts on Skype directly from your address book, for example. On top of that, it also connects to Facebook, making it easy to keep in touch on the move.

There are also reviews from the Guardian, Dave Jeyes, Cristiano Betta and Adam Bowie – all worth reading. And if you’re piqued, you can register on the 3 website for more updates on the release.

Photo by Cristiano Betta.

What sort of comments are we looking for, then? Comments which make a substantive point with a minimum of fuss – the same sort of standards we try to adhere to when we’re writing these blogs, in fact. We don’t edit comments, so make sure yours fits the guidelines before you post it.

We’re trying out this policy on the international and UK blogs to start with. If it works, we’ll roll it out to all of our blogs over the next couple of months. If you have any questions or comments about the policy, either leave a comment below, or chat with me on Skype.

Read the comment guidelines »

You’ll probably remember Rebecca’s non-stop journey around the world last year. She spent 33 days zooming around, not even pausing to eat or sleep (or talk on Skype), and shared her experiences on her blog, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube and even a column in the Telegraph — and (some of the time, at least) showed you just how easy it is to take Skype with you wherever you go.

It turns out that the Interactive Marketing and Advertising award jury rather liked the idea, particularly as it was lots of fun, got lots of attention (760,000 visits to the blog, 140,000 unique page views on Flickr and 300,000 total video views on YouTube during the 33 days) and didn’t cost us much at all. A bit like Skype itself, really.

As a result, the Skype Nomad was announced as the winner of the Technology category at the IMA awards ceremony in London last Thursday. It’s a great honour to win the award – and thanks are also due to our friends at Albion, 3 Monkeys, Outside Line, Sidekick and We Are Social who helped us get Rebecca from A to B, to C, to D, and so on

A software update being pushed to handsets in the UK and Ireland from tomorrow will let you call landlines and mobiles abroad using Skype’s paid-for services from your 3 Skypephone or Skype-enabled 3 mobile. 3 Skypephone users – both S1 and S2 – along with people using Skype on 3 mobiles will be able to take advantage of Skype’s low rates to stay in touch with non Skype users around the world.

Now you’ll have no excuse not to get in touch with your friends, relatives and colleagues, even if they’re on a beach in Sydney or a hotel in Rome :)