Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers including: Skype preview comes to Outlook.com, Jawbone releases new Up platform for iOS, get 20 per cent off iTunes gift cards at Dick Smith.
- Kogan has just won its court case against wholesale provider, ISPOne, which it accused of interfering with customer accounts and dumping prolific users off “unlimited” plans. The upshot of all this is that you won’t be booted from Kogan Mobile now unless you explicitly interfere with the telco’s Fair Play policies and/or terms of service. Read the full report here.
- Linux.conf.au 2014 is happening in Perth, and now the conference has an actual date attached: January 6-10. That’s earlier in the year than we’ve seen for a while, but does avoid Australia Day clashes. Lifehacker, as usual, is planning to attend.
- Microsoft has just released a preview of Skype video calling and messaging in its email service Outlook.com. Skype contacts appear in your Outlook contact list, allowing you to call any Skype user that sends you an email in one click. You can found out more about the preview version at Microsoft’s Outlook Blog
- Dick Smith is once again discounting iTunes cards by 20 per cent. All values are covered by the promotion, which runs until May 15th. Mind you, we can’t remember the last time we paid full price for an iTunes card, but a deal’s a deal all the same. [Via Ozbargain]
- Jawbone today revealed the latest version of its UP platform for iOS along with ten new apps that integrate with the UP fitness wristband. UP version 2.5 for iOS allows you to connect to the app services IFTTT, LoseIt!, Maxwell Health, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Notch, RunKeeper, Sleepio, Wello and Withings. You can read more about the announcement here.
- Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) is a Google-funded program that gives high school teachers the opportunity to learn from academics and professionals in the industry. Today, the search giant announced the funding of 13 universities in Australia and three in New Zealand to provide training to high school computer science teachers. You can see a list of the universities have been been awarded a CS4HS grant at the official Google Australia blog.
- Allure Media — the home of Lifehacker, Gizmodo and others — is on the lookout for a new PHP developer. Tasks will range from general tech support all the way up to building new stuff that will set us apart from the crowd. Get the full details here.
Comments
3 responses to “Briefly: Skype Lands On Outlook, Up Fitness App Gets An Upgrade, PHP Developers Wanted”
In other Jawbone news, they bought Bodymedia (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/30/us-jawbone-bodymedia-idUSBRE93T0M420130430).
Skype in outlook? While an obvious move – I have to wonder why they’re investing in doubling down on Microsoft Lync, which we’ve just upgraded to 2013. The only difference I can think of for business is that Lync operates in a private internal cloud – while Skype obviously does the opposite.
Microsoft has long had a problem in streamlining their products, especially with VoIP.
Just look at the Messenger debacle (version 5 had it, subsequent versions didn’t), their klutzy introduction of OCS, and then the transformation into Lync.
The reason why (for the time being, anyway) that Skype and Lync remain seperate, is mostly protection of revenue.
Businesses love Skype, but Skype doesn’t have a lot of the ‘must haves’ that a larger organisation needs, that Lync provides – Active Directory integration, Exchange integration, SSO, Cisco addon integration, etc etc
Sure, you could buy addons for Skype to do those things, but then you won’t have the all encompassing support that medium to large organisations are willing to pay a pretty penny for.
It’s not a wild guess to speculate that Skype could be bundled into Windows 9 or 10 with a new name, and the ability to connect to Lync servers, so as to facilitate teleworking.
Anyway, time for me to put the crystal ball down, it’s starting to overheat.