If you were with us last month you should now have Skype up and running, scanned your Outlook contacts and probably coerced a few friends into signing up to try out your new toy. We’ve already established that calls between other Skype users are free, while calls to the majority of landlines will cost you little over a penny a minute regardless of your caller’s geographical location. Although such features are suitably impressive, there are still a few tricks left up Skype’s sleeve that should persuade anyone yet to be convinced by the application’s potential.

SkypeOut is the big pulling point of the system. Whereas other such comms-based applications are based around IM software with voice capabilities added as a secondary consideration, Skype is primarily a web-based phone system. Being able to dial regular landlines through the software is a major bonus, but what if you need to reverse the roles and accept calls from landlines to your PC?

Incoming calls
To provide such a function you’ll need to turn to SkypeIn, which provides your own recognisable and unique phone number that can be dialled from any landline to be transferred seamlessly through to your online Skype connection without the end user ever needing to know. There’s a small charge of ¤10 (about £7) for three months or ¤30 (about £20) for a year, but this is negligible when compared with your landline rental costs and the amount of money you could be saving by making yourself directly available to your business contacts or clients.

As with a regular phone, you’ll need to be within earshot of your PC to be aware of an incoming call, although the free voicemail service included with the SkypeIn registration will give you some freedom to wander off to the coffee machine safe in the knowledge that callers will be able to leave messages for you which you can check when your return.

OK, so far there’s little more available through Skype than a regular phone, and you may be thinking that there’s no point in creating yet another phone number for your clients to forget; but so far we’ve only considered the benefits Skype might have for you. It’s no good you being able to phone your business contacts in New York through Skype with its 1p a minute landline cost if they still have their own phone bill concerns when returning the call.

Here is where some lateral thinking will gain you some brownie points with long distance contacts. As you’re not physically connected to a telephone exchange, there’s no real reason for you to adhere to your local dialling code convention. It might make it easier for people to guess you are in London if you adopt a 020 number, but by doing so your clients will still have to pay their regular phone rates to that area code.

Taking our hypothetical contact in New York as an example, there’s no reason why your Skype number couldn’t adopt a 212, 646 or 917 Manhattan code so that should they need to contact you back in Blighty, they’re only paying their regular phone bill as though they were calling you in the next block. And with the ability to create up to 10 unique numbers around the globe you can still keep a local number plus various others to suit other clients.

Bigger business
There are similar cost-saving benefits to be had for larger businesses using the Skype model.

The mobile executive may choose to simply integrate the software with their existing Personal Information Manager (PIM) to ensure Skype contacts are synchronised with a PIM contact list. Contacts can share the same name field, enabling the PIM user to call contacts or send Skype IMs directly from the PIM interface. With SkypeOut, the software can be used to call regular landline and mobile phones. But perhaps the biggest incentive for the larger business to consider Skype would be as a method of providing on-demand content, or for providing call centre and IVR options. Service providers might turn to Skype to provide on-demand content to users in areas such as online sales or distance education. You can decide what to demand for payment of your services without worrying about additional call charges for either you or your customers. Equally, you may choose to employ the different communication methods offered by Skype with a service that could stream audio content while allowing customer interaction through IM, for example.

Necessary modifications for such services might be achievable through the available Skype API, along with ample support through the usual forums and the like (see Going Further, on the right). On the subject of modification, Skype may have been designed primarily with individual communication needs in mind, but through the API there’s no reason why the software can’t be adapted to provide business-calling services such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions, where the software answers the inbound call to provide the user with automated choices.

This could be used for booking, payment or ordering services, and would remain either totally automated or allow operators to be subsequently involved, and these conversations can be recorded for later screening.

Extending Skype
If you’re considering delving into the inner workings of Skype through the API, you’ll undoubtedly find the standard Skype.com address of limited help. The Community pages provide a little help through the Forums and Developer Zone; but due to the software’s success, we are already seeing numerous add-on applications, some of which we’ve illustrated in the boxout below.

The Skype Journal provides a less corporate voice aimed towards professional and business users who may appreciate the more independent opinion from their more experienced peers in the field. With no affiliation to the main Skype site, Skype Journal will help you experiment with new ideas using the API as well as introduce you to like-minded developers.

The Tips and Tricks section is worth a browse as this will encourage you to think of using Skype as much more than a simple one-to-one method of communication. From here you’ll find plenty of advice on how to work with Bluetooth, SMS or even create your own iPod radio station.

The site also provides news and comment on the growing number of hardware products that are beginning the take advantage of the Skype boom. Bluetooth headsets may appeal to those not wanting to be tied behind their PCs during conversations, while USB handsets provide an alternative for those not keen on the headset. There’s even the occasional rumour of video integration floating around on the Skype Journal site although, as yet, the official Skype site is keeping relatively tight-lipped on this subject.

Skype announced it hit the one million user mark back in mid-March, and that number has risen sharply to more than three million just two months later. And with the announcement that Skype has been awarded a prestigious Webby Award for Telecommunications, there’s sure to be a further rise in its user base. If you’re serious about your online services, then maybe you need to think of ways of attracting this growing audience.