ReadWriteWeb

We have written about Cinch in the past -- the company offers a variety of podcasting tools to enable individuals and companies to more easily create and manage audio broadcasts. The company has rebranded its Cinchcast.com service that is now something completely new.

I think I could live quite happily without the "phone" part of my mobile phone. Other than taking press briefings and calling my parents, I rarely use my iPhone for actual calls. I'd rather text or IM. But according to survey results released today, it looks like my preferred methods of communication don't match most Americans'.

A survey of 2300 adults, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by the VOIP service Rebtel, found that Americans still overwhelmingly prefer to communicate by voice. 74% of respondents said that the phone was how they keep in touch with friends and 81% said it's their preferred method of communicating with family members.

The video and voice calling service Skype is coming to a TV near you, thanks to a new partnership with Comcast, a leading provider of cable TV services here in the U.S. This morning, the two companies formally announced a deal that will allow Comcast customers to use Skype's HD video calling on their HD television sets, made available through a Comcast-provided adapter box which works in conjunction with an HD video camera.

Customer trials of the new service will begin in "the coming months," but no exact date was given for the service's wider launch, only that more details will be made available "later this year."

Tired of your old-fashioned IM client, where you have a choice of one-to-one or endlessly scrolling group chat rooms? Then take a look at what Talkwheel.com is attempting with their announcement this week. The free service has a redesigned interface that will make it easier to participate in lots more online chats. As if we really needed an excuse to avoid doing other work.

Maybe Microsoft's multi-billion dollar deal for Skype wasn't such an outlandish deal after all. Because according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the popularity of Internet phone calls has jumped dramatically, with 5% of Internet users placing a VOIP phone call on any given day.

The survey found that almost a quarter of American adult Internet users (24%) have placed a phone call online. That's 19% of all American adults.

Although Steve Ballmer insisted that Microsoft would continue to support Skype on non-Microsoft platforms when it acquired the VOIP company earlier this month, it looks as though that may not necessarily be the case. And the first casualty seems to be Skype's integration with Asterisk, an open source telephony platform.

Digium, the open source project's maintainer, has informed its users that Skype for Asterisk will no longer be available for sale or activation after July 26. According to the notification, Skype has opted not to renew the agreement that allows Digium to utilize Skype's proprietary software in order to turn the open source Asterisk into a native Skype client.

When Microsoft announced its acquisition of Skype, it marked another turning point for many early adopters who have known the simplicity and usefulness of the service since its first days of availability back in 2003.

What the acquisition also represents is the potential for greater adoption by business people. Of course that will depend on how Microsoft treats Skype. It will be integrated into the Microsoft suite for use as a sanctioned communications tool. But the signs are there that Microsoft will respect the service as a stand-alone product for the millions of people who love it for what it is.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates took the stage this morning to go over some of the specifics behind Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of the worldwide communications platform.

Reading between the lines of the talk there are a couple of things that become apparent for what Microsoft has planned for Skype. Foremost, Ballmer said Skype will continue to be a cross-platform service.

"I said it and I mean it. Microsoft will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms because it is fundamental to the value proposition of communications," Ballmer said. "We are one of the few companies that has a track record of doing this. Take a look at the work we have done over the years with Office, for example, for the Mac ... we have a track record of understanding our customers and the need to support our customers as they want to travel."

In the wake of today's confirmed acquisition of Skype by Microsoft Corp., tech press, analysts and armchair quarterbacks alike have been busy speculating why Microsoft would buy Skype (and why it spent $8.5 billion to do so). While we can't address the price of the deal, we do know as of this morning, exactly what Microsoft plans to do with Skype...at least in part.

Skype, the company states, will be coming to Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, plus other Windows devices and communities.

In a shocking late-night turn of events it was revealed Monday that Microsoft has acquired Skype for more than $8 billion. (Confirmed by Microsoft this morning here.) It's a bold move that raises a lot of issues. ReadWriteWeb's Founding Editor Richard MacManus argued that the companies together could make big waves in two key parts of the future: mobile and the connected home. Richard's thoughts about Skype plus Kinect are particularly intriguing.

I want to address the news from a different perspective. For me, as for many others I believe, the acquisition raises a number of fears as well as some hopes.