Most TechCrunch writers are iPhone users. And while we’re still debating whether when what time we will be upgrading to the iPhone 3G S next Friday, we are excited for the iPhone OS 3.0 next Wednesday. We’ve had a few requests to publish the apps we use on our iPhones - and we’re going to share that information with you now.

The following list is by no means all of the apps we have on our iPhones. There are plenty of apps we only use a couple times a month (e.g. Shazam), but when we need them, they’re great. We’ve also linked to any TechCrunch/CrunchGear/MobileCrunch reviews of the apps. Let us know which apps you use in the comments below.

In the past we’ve written about eBay’s Skype conundrum, or the trouble the former has had to successfully integrate the latter’s communication capabilities into the e-commerce giant’s web services. In the recent press release announcing that eBay plans to spin off Skype as a separate company and file for an IPO in 2010, eBay President & CEO John Donahoe admitted as much when he was quoting stating that it’s “clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal.”

And now Skype is being downright disintegrated from eBay’s services, starting with the UK website. This is what the dry announcement message reads (emphasis ours):

(after the jump)

Fring, the Israel-based mobile call and chat application provider, has closed a Series C round of financing on top of the $13 million it has raised since its inception in 2006. The capital comes from its entire list of previous backers: North Bridge Venture Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Veritas Venture Partners and VenFin Limited all participated in the round.

The actual amount raised was not shared, but we’re told that the third round is pretty much on par with the Series B round the company closed in August 2007 (estimated at $12 million when we reported it, but more in the vicinity of $10 million according to information we received later) and that it’s “most definitely not a downround”.

While eBay prepares to unload Skype via a sale or IPO next year, it is busy looking for new ways to make money off its 405 million global users. They already account for an estimated 8 percent of international calls, and many of them are increasingly paying for SkypeOut calls to regular phones. Its revenues last year were $551 million, but it wants to get to $1 billion by 2011. To get there, it might have to start thinking local.

In fact, it has already started trials in Europe and New Zealand with Yellow Pages businesses that turn business phone numbers on the Web into free calls. Mike Boland at the Kelsey Group explains the concept:

After earlier reports that Skype’s founders were trying to buy back the company from eBay, the company has now released the news that it plans to spin off Skype as a separate company and file for an initial public offering. The IPO is intended to be completed in the first half of 2010.

As we reported earlier, eBay has been having trouble finding ways of using Skype across its other products (which CEO John Donahoe admits in a quote from the press release). eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earn-out due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

Last year, Skype generated revenues of $551 million, up 44 % from 2007, and eBay recently announced that it expected its subsidiary to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011. Registered users reached 405 million by the end of 2008, up 47 percent from 2007. Skype now accounts for 8 percent of all international calls by one estimate, and that number is going to keep on growing.

More after the jump

As the New York Times reported, Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are in talks with several private equity firms and are amassing their own financial resources to make a bid for the internet phone business. eBay bought Skype from Zennstrom and Friis for around $3.1 billion in 2005. We reported last year that eBay would be willing to sell Skype if the company couldn’t support eBay’s core ecommerce business.

eBay has been having trouble finding ways of using Skype across its other products. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

We knew it’d be a hit, but not that much of a hit. The official Skype iPhone application, announced earlier this week, hit the iTunes Store last Tuesday and since then it’s seen an astonishing one million downloads to the popular Apple devices, which is nothing short of amazing. That translates to approximately 6 downloads per second.

In the blog post announcing the milestone, Skype blogger Peter Parkes says he’s “confident that it’s one of the fastest-downloaded iPhone apps ever”, which means he’s not really sure. And since we don’t know either, we’re reaching out to you, dear readers. Does Skype now hold the record for reaching the million download mark fastest for a free app, or not?

Are you prepared to have your mind blown? As expected, Skype for iPhone will appear “sometime Tuesday” and allow you to make VoIP calls to friends and family all over the world, a move that at once blows a great waft of flatulence in the face of the carriers and, in one smooth motion, high fives the international community of Skype users.

It should be available from the App Store for free.

Internet telephony and chat service provider Skype, owned by eBay, today announced a potentially game-changing move, opening up to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard for its VoIP services. As evidenced by the discussion going on at Techmeme, the beta program being rolled out by the company marks a clear initiative to target enterprise customers and open up to new revenue streams.

According to the Wall Steet Journal, the new beta software - uncreatively named Skype For SIP for Business users - is expected to allow employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls, which 35% of Skype’s customers are already using for business purposes apparently. The software will also give corporate customers the ability to receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites.

Do most people view their phones as portable computers? According to a recent international survey conducted by Zogby and Skype that looks at how people perceive their mobile phones, the answer seems to be a resounding “no”. But it’s clear that many of the features now associated with smartphones, like custom app stores, are now desired by the huge number of people who use more traditional ‘dumb phones’.

Looking at the results from the United States, many of the datapoints in the survey are not particularly surprising. Of 1,800 people surveyed, 18.9% owned smartphones, which strongly correlated with the 19.3% of participants who viewed their phones as a device used for both computing and making phone calls (said another way, most people with ‘dumb phones’ just use their phones to talk). Given a choice, 66.4% of the participants would rather lose their cell phone over their computer, while only 19.1% would sacrifice their computer (again, given the probable price difference, not surprising).

But there are a few points worth paying attention to. When asked if they thought that phone manufacturers and carriers would do a better job at picking out applications than they could, the vast majority of participants (80.5%), even those with ‘dumb phones’, either disagreed or strongly disagreed - people want to be able to customize their phones.

Skype’s new state of the art speech codec SILK will be made available to third party licensees for free, the company is announcing later today. Skype GM Jonathan Christensen will be speaking about the new program at the eComm event in San Francisco later today.

SILK has been highly regarded by the guys that follow this sort of thing and is included in the most recent version of Skype for Windows (the Mac version with SILK will be coming in April). If both sides of the call have a version of Skype that includes the new codec, the call quality increases dramatically.

Skype is now making the codec available for third party use on a royalty free basis. There are a number of speech codecs available on the market today, including iSac and AMRWideband, and an open source codec called Speex. Skype claims that SILK outperforms all of these.

In a filing with the US Copyright Office, both Skype and Mozilla have expressed their support to a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act related to iPhone jailbreaking, says AppleInsider. This exemption would take away Apple’s ability to charge groups with DMCA violations for circumventing the iPhone’s security by modifying Apple’s internal software.

VoIP service provider Skype has backed the EFF’s exemption request, claiming that “copyright law should not interfere with a user using his or her phone to run Skype and enjoy the benefits of low- or no-cost long-distance and international calling.”

AppleInsider correctly points out that VoIP apps are in fact allowed on the iPhone, as long as they use Wi-Fi.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly, in turn, said he doubted “Mozilla would venture into the iPhone even if the Copyright Office grants the DMCA exemption over jailbreaking”, stating that the iPhone SDK agreements clearly show its Firefox browser is not welcome on the device in a recent interview with ComputerWorld. Note that Mozilla is developing its own mobile browser (Fennec) at the moment, which will compete against mobile browsers based on WebKit, including Apple’s Mobile Safari.

Skype is (finally) teaming up with mobile handset maker Nokia to get their VoIP and IM software program pre-installed on some of its devices, as announced at the Mobile World Congress and reported by MobileCrunch. The eBay-owned company had 405 million registered users in total at the end of last year, and Nokia is still the largest handset maker in the world until further notice, so this is a significant deal.

Of course, the operators won’t be jumping up and down from joy over the news.

The first Nokia device to get the Skype integration will be the N97, beginning in Q3 of 2009, followed by (unnamed but reportedly high-end) Nseries devices. Leveraging N97’s WiFi and HSDPA connectivity, users will be able to communicate with Skype-to-Skype voice calls, as well as make mobile and landline Skype calls at reasonable prices.

But what does this mean for mobile VoIP startups for which supporting Skype functionality on mobile handsets is a prime reason of existence in the first place, like fring, Nimbuzz and Truphone?

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies - this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

Once you’ve dressed up as an elf and danced like crazy with your coworkers it’s hard to get too worked up over a simple video greeting card. But if you are one of the few people left who still send actual dead tree holiday cards (tsk), give this new Skype holiday card thingy a twirl. Email videos out to your friends, embed the festive spirit in your blog like I’ve done below, or just link to it. And if you’re a Facebooker, you can do it all there. Happy Holidays.

This is a loss for Google. Brian O’Shaughnessy, one of the good guys of PR, is leaving Google to run communications for eBay-owned Skype. His last day at Google will be this week.

O’Shaughnessy oversaw communications for all of Google’s user-focused products, including YouTube, Search (Google Chrome), Apps (OpenSocial), Geo (Google Earth), and Mobile (Android).

This is the second high profile PR loss for Google this year. In May Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, left the company to join Facebook.

O’Shaughnessy will be moving to Luxembourg for his new position at Skype. Lucky him.

It’s hard out there for a VOIP solution. Skype rules the desktop and Vonage rules the den so where does an upstart like VoxOx belong?

The product, founded by a group of voice networking ninjas who wanted to create a desktop-based VOIP and chat solution with full IM and social network integration. Think of it, then as a cross between Adium/Digsby and Skype with a little Grand Central thrown in.

Since most of you don’t have an Android G1 phone, we are featuring some video reviews from the AppVee crew to show you what you are missing (or not, depending on your point of view). You can watch the first ten video reviews in an earlier post. Below are five more, two of which are on my top ten (ShopSavvy and iSkoot for Skype).

One of the most potentially useful set of apps on Android turn the phone into a barcode scanner and let you compare prices on the go. In fact, there are two apps that do this, ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere. They are currently the No. 2 and No. 4 apps on the Android Market, respectively. Both look through the phone’s camera lens to scan a product’s barcode and look it up in a database to retrieve price comparisons from both the Web and local stores.

Although eBay beat its downwardly-revised earnings numbers today, its earnings call was filled with glum news for investors. (Full earnings slides embedded below). After three flat quarters, revenues declined 3.6 percent from the second quarter to $2.2 billion. Free cash flow has been going down each of the last four quarters, and so has the total value of goods traded over the auction and e-commerce site. eBay is leaning much more heavily these days on merchant-dominated categories like autos than on auctions between ordinary people.

Even PayPal’s revenues were flat in the quarter at $597 million. Maybe the $945 million acquisition of Bill Me Later will help reignite growth. Its classifieds business (Kijiji) brought in a respectable $250 million in revenues.

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time.

After 6 months of not-quite-official availability for those of us with jailbroken iPhones, Fring, a free mobile Voice-over-IP service, has made its way to the App Store. With that, a day that some said would never come has arrived: Skype calls can now be made on the iPhone, no hacks required.

Beyond the Skype functionality (which I imagine would be its most popular use), Fring also lets you chat with (and call, where appropriate) friends over MSN, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo, Twitter, ICQ, and of course, Fring’s own service.