Internet telephony and chat service provider Skype is officially launching Skype Connect 1.0 (formerly Skype for SIP), to the public (you can see the release here). The service has been in beta since last year.

Skype Connect allows a business’ employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls. Users can receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites.

Outbound calls from desktop phones to landlines and mobiles worldwide are billed at Skype’s standard per-minute calling rates and users can receive inbound calls from Skype connected users worldwide by placing Skype’s Click & Call buttons on their Web sites. Skype calls to your SIP-enabled PBX are free of charge to people using Skype.

Pricing for the use of the Skype Connect is €4.95 per channel per month with long-distance calls charged at Skype’s standard per minute call rates (with call rounding). Each channel purchased allows for either one inbound or one outbound call at any time. You can buy up to 300 channels per SIP Profile. Skype Connect can be launched and managed via Skype Manager, a web-based tool that allows IT managers to control Skype usage in a company.

Skype says that approximately 37% of Skype users reported that they use Skype for business-related activities and this particular offering could bring significant revenue from the enterprise sector.

Skype, which filed for an IPO earlier this month, is looking for revenue channels and unsurprisingly sees potential in enterprise use of the service. Of course, it should be interesting to see if the rumors pan out and Cisco ends up buying Skype.

Martin Hellman writes "According to an article in Nature magazine, quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission —' they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Wave is a new web application designed to make groups of people more productive when communicating and working together. In Google Wave, everything takes place in flexible, hosted conversations known as waves. Waves are shared spaces on the web that update live as you type and support rich media and real-time gadgets.
Today, Google Apps admins can give their users access to the Google Wave preview through Apps. Domain administrators can turn Google Wave through the control panel and users can sign in at http://wave.google.com/a/[yourdomain.com].

Editions included:
Standard, Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
US English (Next generation control panel)

How to access what's new:
Administrators can enable Google Wave for your domain from the administrator control panel by clicking on 'Add more services'.

To enable the preview of Google Wave:
1) Click "Add it now"
2) Confirm that you would like to enable Google Wave
3) Visit the 'Settings' tab to specify domain access controls and email notification defaults
4) Sign in to Google Wave at http://wave.google.com/a/yourdomain

Note: In ‘Domain Settings’, make sure that the checkbox ‘Enable pre-release features’ is also enabled. Google Wave for Google Apps is currently a Labs service and is not supported by the Google Apps Support team.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-labs-available-today-to.html
Help Centre: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=28653

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For reasons as yet unknown, a dark band on the giant planet's southern hemisphere has recently vanished

Ah, Jakob Nielsen. Anyone who has ever been involved with serious document design or web usability will know his name. If you've never heard of him, the best way to describe him would probably be this: he's the Richard Stallman of usability. He has a set of very clear ideas about user interface and document design, which more often than not get in the way of beauty. He has performed a usability study, with real users, on the iPad.

Google Ventures has just invested an undisclosed amount in Recorded Future, a company that is working to accurately predict the future.

In a recent comment John mentioned that the OpenID component doesn’t work with Google Apps OpenIDs. And he was right.

The reason it didn’t work is that Google introduced it’s own OpenID discovery protocol as they faced challenges not addressed by the current version (2.0) of the OpenID standard. And this means such OpenIDs are not recognized by current OpenID libraries. For this reason, Google provides with php-openid-apps-discovery an add-on to the PHP OpenID library.

I integrated this add-on into the OpenID component as an optional feature. You have to enable it with:

public $components = array('Openid' => array('accept_google_apps' => true));

I made it an optional feature because it introduces an additional step to the authentication process: the provided OpenID url is sent to Google to figure out whether it is a Google Apps OpenID. And this makes the authentication process a bit slower. Hence I think you should have a choice whether you want to use this feature.

The new version of the OpenID component doesn’t contain any other new features/bugfixes.

You can download the component from Github.

Enjoy!

When you think of one percent of something, it’s usually not a very big number. But in some cases it is. Like when you’re talking about all of the users of the Internet in the world.

Today, OpenDNS is announcing that over one percent of the world’s Internet users are using its services. It’s the first DNS provider to hit such a milestone, and it means that over 18 million people are using the service to access the web in a way that founder and CEO David Ulevitch calls “safer, faster, smarter and more reliable.“

And that usage number has doubled in just the last 12 months, according to Ulevitch.

That type of growth is important because a new, big time player just entered the ring: Google. But despite the big name, and the right price (free), the results for Google’s DNS offering have varied. And in a test we ran with Google’s own Namebench product, OpenDNS easily beat Google in DNS speed.

The truth is that most users have no idea what any of these DNS services do, or how to go about changing them. So companies like OpenDNS have to rely on partnerships with schools (they have over 25,000), partnerships with large corporations (they have them with many Fortune 500 companies), or parents really worried about what their children are surfing for on the web. But again, the growth is clearly happening, and actually picking up speed, according to Ulevitch, so that’s a very good sign.

An even better sign: OpenDNS has been profitable since 2007.

[photo: flickr/jurvetson]

The movie they created from the data, has aided astronomers studying both Saturn's northern and southern aurorae. Given the rarity of such an event, this new footage will likely be the last and best equinox movie that Hubble captures of our planetary neighbor.

A CakePHP 1.3 plugin that provides UNIX-like row-level permissions for model data.