For years, Skype has been helping people stay connected with video and voice calling. Now, the company is hoping to address the issue of staying connected between those phone calls.
The Microsoft-owned VoIP company has announced a new application that is supposed to be used in combination with Skype. Of course, the folks in Redmond would never want you to stop using Skype, but Qik is really quite a different idea, no matter how much Microsoft is trying to push the ‘stay connected between calls’ line.
In short, Qik allows users to record and send and receive short video messages from their contacts. Videos sent to contacts only last two weeks before they’re erased, and you can delete specific videos ahead of that deadine (whether they’ve been viewed or not) if you regret that declaration of love or goofy joke. You can also block users (on Android and Windows Phone, and soon iPhone), record five second GIFs of yourself (on iPhone and Android, and soon Windows Phone), and send Qiks to groups of people. Because it’s a separate application, Qik uses your phone’s contact list instead of your Skype contact list.
Qik is available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone but requires a phone number during set up, so tablets are out unless they have cellular connectivity. Absent from the blog post announcing the app’s arrival is any mention of the old Qik, the video-sharing app that Skype bought in 2011 for $150 million.
Shut down earlier this year, that version of Qik allowed users to share videos from specific phones with a combination of video calling and video recording software. Videos could also be saved to your desktop. Skype hasn’t said whether videos captured and shared in Qik’s current form can be saved by either the author or the recipient.
[source]Skype[/source]
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