Web 2 Ireland

This has been a long time coming but the Skype guys have just announced that we can have our own SkypeIn numbers here. It normally costs €53 for a full year but SkypePro subscribers (like me) who already pay €2 a month get a €30 discount.

They offer numbers with Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and Other (076) area codes. You can also pick from a selection of numbers rather than having one assigned randomly to you.

The reasons for having one are pretty simple:

• People can call you from ordinary phones at local rates in many cases
• You can answer those calls no matter where you are as long as you are on Skype
• No extra fees or per-minute charges to receive the calls on Skype

Whilst I'm happy to see this coming and use Skype every day, I believe that SIP based non-proprietary solutions will eventually win the day.

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Comment posted by John Murphy
at 12/3/2007 10:31:49 AM

Sorry to disappoint – Galway is not on the list..I guess it is ocer to Blueface after using skype for 3 years!

Comment posted by Technology and People – No Dublin Office but need a Dublin Number? Skype In will do nicely
at 9/12/2007 4:00:04 AM

[] which has given us a London number for over a year now (+44 2081 23 2081 ) for just over 30 Euro. Conor reported today that SkypeIn finally has Dublin numbers available. So after signing up, our new Dublin office is 01 44 33 123. We're fairly open about who we []

Comment posted by Ken McGuire
at 9/7/2007 12:33:26 PM

Thats great news Line rental and phone company out the window come the 16th of this month, all bills cleared, been waiting for the day Skype got around to Irish SkypeIn numbers. Some number (and handset) shopping to be done!

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 9/7/2007 9:21:50 AM

I think we are going to see a lot of SIP-oriented announcements in the coming months and not just on the desktop.

I do wish Gizmo was a slicker product as it can easily give Skype a run for its money based on core features.

Back to bashing Google – I can't wait for GrandCentral to work in Ireland so I can link up land-line, mobile and Gizmo seamlessly! I guess I'll need SkypeIn for it to work with Skype?

I'm going to check out Wengo.

Comment posted by Donn
at 9/7/2007 8:56:37 AM

Conor, I hope you're right about SIP based non-proprietary solutions eventually winning the day but to be honest I think it's going to be quite a while before that happens. I am definitely in favour of applications that use open protocols though.

I started using Wengo a while ago which I really liked and thought it looked like a very good alternative as you could use different protocols and contact people who have google chat, yahoo, hotmail etc. accounts, obviously you can't contact other skype accounts because of their closed protocol. Unfortunatley I've been having problems with Wengo recently which I haven't looked into yet but hopefully things will progress for them and we might see a serious contender at some stage.

I'm sure there are a lot of other alternatives available but I haven't looked into it for quite a while.

Comment posted by Linkage – 07/09/07 at Sean's Blog
at 9/7/2007 6:31:28 AM

[] Skype finally gets its Irish SkypeIn numbers. []

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 9/7/2007 5:48:49 AM

I use Live Local (or Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail Local MSN Maps as I call it) all the time too. The maps are far superior to Google for Cork. It has some great features too which I've only recently discovered.

Comment posted by Alex Leonard
at 9/7/2007 4:56:04 AM

Ah finally! I was wondering how long it would take for that to happen. Nice one. I might actually consider getting a Dublin number for our clients to call.

Couldn't agree more about Ireland always taking a little longer to get everything. I guess our 3-4 million population just isn't as appealing as some other countries. That being said, I've generally found local.live.com to give much better mapping for Ireland than Google Maps. It's improving but quite slowly.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 9/6/2007 1:20:18 PM

We tend to get things a bit after the more populous countries

For example, outside of the big cities, Google Maps is a joke here. This is in spite of the fact that the European HQ is in Dublin and Google pushes over a billion dollars each year through the Irish division to save on US taxes.

Comment posted by Nicole Simon
at 9/6/2007 11:56:09 AM

wow interesting, if you had asked me before i would have guessed you already had that available!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 5:31 am and is filed under Irish Web2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.