Google error?

Jan Geirnaert from Malaysia – famous Skype blogger by the way – told me that when searching for the words “jean mercier skype” it gives a strange result:

We tried other keyword (for instance “Jan Geirnaert Skype” or anything else) or even other browsers and it always gave that small warning “This site may harm your computer.”. When you click on the search result you get a special "Malware warning" webpage saying: “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” and you get stuck there. Weird. Strange!

No such thing with other search engines. I think they have a temporary problem at Google.

Updated: problem seems to be over!

Last quarter 2008 results

Skype revenue growth is flattening: it increased only by 1.2% in US$, and about 3.7% in €. In the eBay slides they say: “On an fx neutral basis Skype revenue accelerated 5 pts” (fx neutral means “foreign currency neutral basis”). Considering the economical crisis, this isn’t too bad.I am however surprised about the weak revenue increase, because SkypeOut minutes rose by 18%. And SkypeOut minutes means revenue. If most people were still calling (like I do) on a “per minute” cost, revenue should have risen proportionally. Therefore, this probably means that most people call through a fixed price “calling plan”. Could it be that, from an economical point of view, this is a "too low" margin product?More spectacular is the growth of the Skype to Skype minutes: this rose by 28%. The economical crisis could have helped to obtain this, because … this is completely free, inclusive webcam calling! One could however expect some revenue increase from Skype certified products (headphones, webcams, etc.). Personally I think this is dying revenue stream, because certified or not, most webcams and headphones and other devices work with Skype! Why should a manufacturer therefore transfer part of its income to Skype?
User accounts continue to show a quite linear growth. I would have expected a stronger growth last quarter, for the same “economical crisis” reason.

Revenue per user account (or should I say username?) show a decaying tendency. But, as I said in the past, this is a very misleading metric, because it includes all usernames created from the beginning, including “dead” accounts and multiple accounts of one user. Pity that Skype doesn’t publish the number of active accounts!Next quarter could be better, because I see a quite spectacular increase of concurrent users online, and this will for sure influence indirectly the revenue stream.

15 million today

Usually i am the first or second to blog about it. Today, two other fanatic Skypers warned me that I should blog. I was aware, but too busy … 15 million concurrent users online today, congratulations Skype and its users!

So, what is exceptional about this? Not that million added of course, not the 84 days it took to reach the 15 million, but it could be that we add another million before the end of June. In that case it will be the first time in Skype history that we cross 4 times a million milestone in one Northern Hemisphere “school year”.
Anyway, Skype shows a quite strong growth the last months!

First of all, happy New Year to all my readers.

Running two different Skype accounts on one Windows computer is possible, and has been explained several times in the past, see for instance the explanation of “Peter Mad Raven” here. However, this implied that you should have a computer with multiple accounts.

Today I was starting my spare laptop (Windows XP). My Skype didn’t start and I thought: “Hell, the kids disabled the automatic launching of Skype”. Therefore I started Skype (the latest 4.0 beta version) manually. I didn’t notice however that the startup was still going on. And all of a sudden I had two instances of Skype running on “one Windows user id”. I only got a message that I already was logged in, but I could use the second Skype client to log in into another Skype account. Interesting, I didn’t know! I could chat from one account to another on the same computer and even call! Not very useful of course.

But what IS useful, is that it seems to be possible to run two instances (or perhaps more) on one computer with only one Windows user account. So, if your partner has a Skype account, and you have yourself one, you can run both on the same computer without bothering to enable different Window accounts. Does somebody have a trick to make this “automatic” at startup?
[Edited] Thanks to a comment of Edgaras and a correction by Vincent i learned that this is a feature. The explanation how to do it is here: Does Skype for Windows have command line options in Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows?
In fact type "/secondary" as a command-line parameter to skype.exe and this allows you to start an additional skype.exe instance. This is indeed a very nice new feature!