Send your Christmas greetings as videos via Skype

If you’re looking for a more interesting way to send your Christmas greetings electronically than a standard E-Card (and you’ve just about missed the last day for postage in the UK, so you don’t have much choice for last minute greetings!), you might want to check out the Christmas video greetings from Skype.

It’s available either as a Facebook application, or as a standalone service. And if you use the standalone version you can embed your video message in your blog, as a Christmas greeting – so be very glad I don’t have a webcam with me at work!

It made me wonder how Christmas card sales will perform this year – those of those who are connecting to people online have many more contacts who we might want to send a Christmas greeting to, around the globe, and in an economical way.

Or is this an area where doing something personal by sending a physical object makes a big difference?

Definitely interesting times for a variety of companies and industries that had successful products just a few years ago. I’ve just seen the news that Polaroid has gone bankrupt – as Tomi says, instant pictures haven’t gone out of fashion, they’ve just moved to mobile phones. Personally, the last time I had a reason to think about the Polaroid brand was when I found a couple of their old cameras in the loft…

Another great tool for improving email – this time, Outlook

I’ve already shown how to improve your email experiences with the Remember The Milk gadget for Googlemail, and OtherInbox for filtering signups and other email detritus. But, like many people, I’m tied to Outlook for my main corporate email – but there’s an easy way to improve it with Xobni, that just got even better.

It’s an add-in for Outlook which search funtions, email anlytics and more, including a useful list of which documents have been sent to other people in email conversations. Plus it also already featured integration with LinkedIn for more details about who is emailing you.

Now the latest release includes integration with Yahoo Mail!, Facebook, Hoovers and enhanced Skype functionality.

If you’re using Outlook, Xobni is highly recommended.