Skype, Microsoft, AIM, Yahoo, Lycos, all of those companies have or will have options for doing phone calls from the computer; at stake is the biggest prize of all – keeping a person using a given provider’s other services.

Author John Battelle announced the beta version of Federated Media’s advertising platform to enable ad clients to create their campaigns for FM’s network of high-quality blogs.

Skype launched a new beta (version 2.5.0.72) today of its software for Windows that has some pretty neat new features.

Version 2.5 Beta of the Skype VoIP software arrived with new features, and Skype also launched a preview version of Skypecasts that allows up to 100 people to connect in a voice chat.

Rob La Gesse wrote me a very constructive email today about how difficult beta testing Microsoft’s products is. Instead of emailing it around I asked him “could you blog it?”

Time is running out; just four days left to snag a year of Microsoft’s excellent Windows Live OneCare security software for just twenty bucks.

Like quite a few people, I’ve installed Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 that Microsoft released as part of broadening out their beta testing programme of the new browser version to as wide an audience as possible. I like it and, compared to the earlier beta, it seems pretty stable.

The long-awaited blog search engine Sphere was delayed from its scheduled public beta launch citing a demand heavier than anticipated.

Fun party last night with the Internet Explorer team.

The third beta version of Internet Explorer 7 became available for download as a true beta release instead of just a preview release, or an update to the preview release.

Microsoft has released a new build of Windows Vista. Here’s some stuff:

The Oslo-based software company moved version 9 of its freely available browser into public beta after receiving feedback on its two prior technology preview releases of Opera 9.

I’ve spent a bit of time this weekend with software and servers.

This didn’t take too long: As Google Blogoscoped shows, one blogger has already figured out how to combine Google Related Links with advertising, simply by putting the Links box on top of an AdSense ad.

Do you like to keep track of message boards for a particular stock? I admit, I still keep an eye on what’s being said about a certain company from my past.

Its April, and you know what that means.

Tim Beerman over at his interactive earth blog has recently announced that shape2earth will be going out for beta testing shortly.

As the number of inputs we allow into our lives increases, there’s a huge demand for tools that help us manage our attention.

The first post with the second beta of the forthcoming ecto for Windows version 2 offline blog editor.

I like Skype. I like the woman that initially launched the service via PR, and she did an amazing job.

Newsgator is on a roll lately. They are working on a series of upgrades to their terrific online product.