Have a Skype day!

I have a number of very cool readers who send me things, and they are increasingly the lifeblood of this humble bloglet. I think this may have received some coverage elsewhere, though I haven't come across anything in English. Norwegian CRM specialist HansaWorld have incorporated Skype into their suite of call center tools. This article says that the Hansa folks found the integration to be really smooth, though they note that SkypeOut quality is highly variable. HansaWorld claims 64k SME customers worldwide.

And they're by no means the only ones doing it, though some of the other "implementations" are not so high-tech. Check out this site, a directory of language schools. At the bottom of the orange column entitled "EDITO" you should see "Call us free of charge using skype.com. We are here to help."

UPDATE: I subsequently went into my Skype client and searched for users under the word "language" and turned up no fewer than nine user names which appear to be language schools or services businesses. Curiosity piqued, I then searched for "pizza" and turned up a few of what appear to be real-world pizzerias, including one claiming to be a Dominos in Australia. There are also a helluva lot of entries under "hotel" which appear to actually be hotels, as there are for the word "restaurant". Then again, the word "viagra" also turns up some very interesting things...

UPDATE 2: Searching for "IBM" in my Skype client just now, I come up with a lot of spurious or suspicious results, but there is also a fair number of users with normal name and "IBM" in brackets afterward, as though it is a formal affiliation.

UPDATE 3: I have also found someone claiming to be Bill Gates, and five Paris Hiltons.