Squawk Box Oct 1: Skype 4.0 Beta 2

Phew. There was no talk of the markets today. Heading back to technology, our guest this morning was Mike Bartlett, Skype‘s product manager for Windows to discuss Beta 2.0 of the Skype 4.0 product.

Skype 4.0 beta 1 was launched June 18th. Since then, Skype has seen up to 350,000 simultaneous users of beta 1 online at any particular time. Building from over 50,000 pieces of feedback, the company made choices about what features to include in the new beta.

Mike told us about the company’s goals for the first beta, the things they learned, some of the key features that they included in the new beta, and why. He also described how the company makes choices about which platforms to support, and alluded to an upcoming Mac release for our long suffering participants on the call who use Macs.

To download the latest beta of Skype, click here.

On the Calliflower Conference Call today: Mike Bartlett, Dan York, Yusuf Motiwala, Hudson Barton, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, James Body, Phil Wolff, Todd, Steve Sokol, Andrew Hansen, and Sergio Meinardi.

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.