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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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]