The holiday shopping season is upon us, and if you're trying to think up a few good gift ideas for your geeky or not so geeky friends and family, we're here to help. Over the next few days we'll be bringing you a number of suggestions for Download Squad style gifts.

To kick things off, I wanted to talk about a gift idea for the computer user who doesn't really need any new software: subscriptions. Nothing says I love you like a year's worth of unlimited domestic VoIP phone calls, or the security of knowing your files are securely backed up to an offsite storage space. Well, maybe not nothing, but certainly few things. Here are a few ideas for subscription based services you might want to buy for your loved ones. Feel free to add your own ideas or argue with my choice of services in the comments.

Skype

Skype provides a free way for Windows, Mac, and Linux users to make free voice or video calls to one another. But you can also buy credit or monthly subscriptions to make calls to regular telephones. You can also purchase a phone number that people can call to ring you on Skype.

Prices range from a few cents a minute for domestic calls, to $9.95 a month for unlimited international calls. For less than $36 a year you can buy a plan that will allow users to make unlimited domestic calls in the US and Canada. $60 a year will get you a SkypeIn phone number. And there are a ton of other options available.

Skype isn't the only game in town. You might also want to check out Gizmo5 or newcomer VoxOx.

VoxOx is one of those applications that does so many things that the easiest way to describe it is by listing some of the tools it can replace: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, whatever email and social networking notifiers you use. In other words, it's like Digsby. But with support for video chat and VoIP calls to telephones. Oh yeah, and VoxOx automatically assigns all new users a phone number which people can dial to reach you on your computer.

VoxOx is currently in beta, with clients available for Windows and OS X. Linux and mobile clients are coming soon. And right now some of the services listed in VoxOx are unavailable. For examle, you can link the client to your Yahoo! Mail account to receive a pop up message every time you get a new email. But when you click the button to do the same thing with Gmail, nothing happens.

One of the most interesting things about VoxOx is the company's business model. You can do text chats with anyone for free. You can make free voice or video calls to anyone using VoxOx. And when you sign up you get 120 minutes of free calls to telephones. You can purchase credit for additional calls, or pay a monthly fee fro unlimited access. But every time you refer a friend to the service you get another 2 hours. And VoxOx will also soon add the ability for users to gain points by watching video ads.

If you're one of the first 500 Download Squad to register using our signup page, you'll get 1200 VoxOx Points which are good for 1200 domestic phone calls minutes of domestic US phone calls. Keep reading to find out how to get your bonus minutes.

Internet telephony service Jaxtr lets you add a widget to your web site that lets visitors contact you over the phone. Now the company is launching a new service that routes telephone calls over the internet whether you're taking the time to click a button on a web site or not.

Here's how it works. When someone views your Jaxtr profile, they can click a "Call Me" button. Jaxtr will then bring up a local phone number they can call. So if you're in the US and the person who wants to call you is in China, they'll get a Chinese phone number. Jaxtr makes the connection over the internet, but once you've got a number, you can use it any time you like. No computer necessary.

You can call other Jaxtr users for free, or purchase credits (called "Jax") which you can use to make cheap long distance calls.

[via VentureBeat]

VoIP provider Skype lets you make PC to PC calls or make calls from your computer to a telephone. But if you live in the US, up until now when you made a call from Skype to a telephone, ther person you were calling wouldn't see your number on the caller ID. They's see some random string of numbers like 000123456.

Skype has now added a Caller ID option that will let you use your SkypeIn phone number or your cellphone number for Caller ID purposes. To activate the feature, just log into your account through the Skype web site, and select Caller ID from the Account menu. If you have a SkypeIn number to receive phone calls, that will automatically be selected as your new ID. If you'd rather use your mobile phone number, just enter the number and Skype will send you an SMS with an activation code. Note that it could take up to 24 hours before the changes take effect.

If you have multiple SkypeIn numbers with different area or country codes, you can also select an option that will automatically display a number that's local to the call destination when available.

Skype has offered a similar Caller ID feature for European customers for a while now.

[via Skype Journal]

WhitePages.com has announced a deal to purchase Snapvine, a company that provides voice applications for social networking sites. WhitePages plans to continue offering Snapvine's current services, including tools for "voice blogging," leaving voice comments on social networking sites, and adding voice comments to photos. But WhitePages also plans to roll out new services, including:

• Free, private voicemail boxes
• Email
• SMS services

Last month WhitePages abandoned plans to buy Jangl, a similar service. The WhitePages web site includes phone numbers for about 180 million people living in the US. Using Snapvine, WhitePages will be able to let individuals replace their phone numbers on the site with personal voicemail boxes or click to call buttons thet lets people reach them via phone without actually giving away their phone number.

[via TechCrunch]

Have friends, relatives, or business contacts located in faraway lands? Internet telephony company Skype is launching its first plan that lets you make unlimited international PC to telephone calls, assuming you're calling a landline in one of 34 countries covered by the plan.

Most of Europe is covered, as well as the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.The $9.95/month plan doesn't cover calls to cellphones in all areas, but you can call mobile phones in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Or you can just convince everybody you know to install Skype on their computers and mobile phones so you can make Skype to Skype calls for free.

[via AP]

VoIP company Jaxtr has added a new module that lets uses send free text messages to any cellphone from their Jaxtr homepage. There's no fee for sending the message, but if the recipient has to pay per message, you might want to think twice before sending dozens of messages a day. Unless you hate the person you're texting, of course.

We first covered Jaxtr way back in 2006 when the company released a tool for blogger and web publishers to embed a widget on their web sites that let visitors place calls to the web site author. You can also add a Jaxtr widget to social networking pages like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Orkut.

Honestly, we don't know too many people who want to take phone calls all day from visitors to their web sites or social networking profiles. But now that we've discovered the free SMS service, we can actually see ourselves using Jaxtr on a regular basis.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Internet telephony company GrandCentral was down for several hours this morning. That wouldn't be so bad if GrandCentral's business model didn't depend on telling users to give out their GrandCentral phone numbers instead of their cellphone, work, home, and other numbers. GrandCentral, which is owned by Google, provides a single number that can ring through to each of your phones. And most of the time it works brilliantly.

But GrandCentral is still in beta. And while we've grown used to Google's beta products being more stable than many companies' final release products, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a beta product goes down. And this morning, a lot of people were probably worried about missing phone calls because of the outage.

The service was restored by noon, Pacific time. But the fact that a "power issue" at a single facility could knock out GrandCentral phone service across the country is going to make us think twice before giving out our GrandCentral phone number from now on. Hopefully one of the things Google will do before taking the beta label off of GrandCentral is build some redundancy into the system to avoid this sort of problem in the future.

While Call Graph certainly isn't the only Skype plugin that lets you record calls for free, it is certainly one of the simplest to use. And it's free, which always helps. Several other popular Skype recording applications like Pamela let you record up to 15 minutes for free, but you'll have to pony up some cash for a license if you want to record longer calls. There are no such limitations on Call Graph.

Here's how it works. You install Call Graph, and it will automatically record every call you make as a 128kbps MP3 file. You'll know it's working because a window will pop up letting you know the call is being recorded and asking if you want to stop the recording. You can also click the icon in the system tray to configure Call Graph so that it won't automatically record every call.

When a call ends, a window will pop up showing you a list of recent calls. You can play, rename, tag, or delete files from this window. There's also a search bar to find previous calls, which can come in handy as long as you've been diligent about adding tags.

Call Graph appears to be Windows only for now, and it's officially a public beta, although it seems to work pretty well.

[via Online Tech Tips]

Web telephony service Jaduka has launched a bunch of new tools that make it easy to initiate telephone to telephone calls over the web. The most basic service is called dukaDIAL, and it allows you to enter any two phone numbers to initiative a phone call. DukaDIAL will call one number and then the other and initiate a connection. No computer headset or microphone required. Jaduka doesn't charge anything for these calls, but your telephone provider might.

Jaduka offers several other services that use the same basic technology. For example, dukaBAR is a browser toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer. Once it's installed you can click a button and automatically detect any phone number on any web page. A telephone icon will show up next to those phone numbers, and if you click on that icon, Jaduka will initiate a phone call between your number and the number on the page. Skype offers a similar browser plugin, but with Skype you're making a PC to phone call, while Jaduka initiates phone to phone calls.

There's also a dukaBuzz widget which you can install on any web page to allow visitors to leave listen to voice comments, and a dukaLINK tool for creating clickable links that will initiate phone calls.

Startup Ribbit is preparing to launch in impressive looking internet telephony service in a few months. The company's Amphibian phone service provides a ton of features, but in a nutshell you could describe Amphibian as a cross between Google's GrandCentral and Skype with a few extra bits thrown in like an open developer platform and some social networking features.

Here's how it works. You can make calls from Ribbit.com or any website with an embedded Amphibian phone application. You will also be able to load up an Adobe AIR version of the software so you can make calls without firing up your web browser. You can see a list of received calls on the web, and you can see user profiles for missed or incoming calls if they're available.

But you can also link Amphibian to your other phone numbers of VoIP accounts. So if someone calls your home, work, or cellphone number or your Skype, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk account you can take the call using Amphibian.

Ribbit has also partnered with SimulScribe, a service that transcribes voicemail into text. This allows you to read or even search your voicemail. SimulScribe integration doesn't come free though. According to TechCrunch, Ribbit's business plan is to allow users to make PC to PC phone calls for free, but the company will charge a subscription fee for calls to telephones. Users who want to purchase additional services from third parties like SimulScribe will pay an additional fee, although we're sure some add-ons will be offered for free.

[via TechCrunch]

There are some signs that Skype VoIP software may be coming Sony's PSP. According to Sony's CES PR documentation, Skype is going to be available on the PSP. We tried to contact Skype's PR department for an official word, but they said "No comment at this time". We'll see what happens when CES kicks off this coming week.

For now, we can only rely on the fact that Skype is listed in the PSP's feature list on their site, as seen below.

MySpace is on the move to add some extra value to their online offerings, and as we mentioned in October, it looks like things are starting with an overhaul of their IM tool.

In its previous incarnation, MySpaceIM was a bare bones instant messaging application. It launched early last year and then disappeared for a while. Now myspaceim is back, and MySpace has partnered with Skype to add VoIP calling to the chat client.

MySpace users will instantly have their friends list populated with upon install with one click login to mail and bulletins. MySpace friends profiles are also one click away.

The social networking site claims the beta version of the client has been installed over 500,000 times. Now that MySpace is taking the beta label off of the chat client, we expect to see that number climb even higher. But will MySpace users who don't already know one another offline actually like to talk with each other rather than just add each other as friends?

If desktop VoIP calling program Gizmo Project previously had a reputation as a Skype Killer, it's now official: Skype is dead. Gizmo has always done things Skype couldn't--like custom on-hold music, SIP compatibility, meta-IM with support for Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk, and a slew (that means dozens) of other things. Indeed, some of us here at Download Squad haven't had Skype in our startup items for a year or more.

Gizmo Project 4.0 beta just hit the wild. New in this edition are a reworked avatar system, tabbed text chatting, a totally redesigned user interface, and video calling, a feature that we got a first look at with an earlier beta release last month.

Ordinarily, Gizmo Project's creator, SIPPhone Inc., does a good job of getting features to their Mac and Linux editions in a hurry (though 4.0 beta isn't yet available for Mac). In this case, however, the Nokia N800/N810 version is also ready to rock, which really excites us, since Nokia's Internet Tablets have built-in cameras that are ideal for video calling.

As with previous versions of the Project, you can still make outgoing (and receive incoming) telephone calls, and make yourself reachable via a sipphone.com URI. So, with the last nail in Skype's coffin being hammered in by the good folks at SIPPhone, we're asking ourselves if we'll ever need to run Skype again. After all, with services like GrandCentral supporting Gizmo Project, and with the availability of a native Gizmo Project client for mobile phones, it looks like Gizmo Project is ready to bury eBay's redheaded stepchild.