As expected, Microsoft today released Skype for Windows version 5,8, which among other new features allows you to conduct a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within the Skype client. You can download the new version from skype.com/go/download.

Here’s the changelog for version 5.8.0.154:

Full HD video-calling
Support for Facebook audio and video-calling (beta)
Group screen sharing
Hide offline Facebook contacts
Push to Talk
Skype updater service
Bing Bar integration

The new version means Skype users can check their Facebook News Feeds, instant messages, and video call their Facebook friends all from within Skype. Even if your Facebook friends are not on Skype, they can still pick up a Skype instant message or video call from within Facebook.

To start a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype, you must first connect your Skype and Facebook accounts (sign in to the Skype client, click on the Connect to Facebook tab, and log in to Facebook). Once that’s done, you can select a Facebook friend and hit the video call button in Skype — your friend can then pick up the call from Facebook.

Even before this update, Skype already let you see when your Facebook friends are online, read their status updates, instant message them using Facebook Chat, comment and Like their posts, check and update your News Feed, all within the client. After helping Facebook launch video calling for its 845 million active users, the company has now ported the feature over to its desktop application as well.

While this new version is only for Windows, the Mac-equivalent of this update is still in the works. The latest version is Skype 5,4 Beta for Mac.

According to WPSauce, Microsoft has revealed some interesting facts about Tango during the developers’ camp in India. The next version will up the language support from 35 to 120, which shows that Microsoft wants to expand its markets to emerging and developing nations as well. Also, the next version will come with native support for C++, thereby making it easy for developers to code or port apps over to the mobile platform.

However, it has still not been confirmed, whether the ‘next release’ would be the immediate Tango or the upcoming Apollo. Meanwhile, PocketPC have managed to get a screen grab of a Tango running WP7 phone, which shows Skype as well as Google+ integration into the messenger hub. Now that Microsoft owns Skype, it was only a mater of time till this feature was integrated, but we are pleasantly surprised to see it done so quickly. The folks who took the screenshot claimed that chatting over both these services work well, but Skype’s voice calling were a bit buggy. Video calling will also be available, but it may not come out in time for Tango. We don’t know for certain if the screen grab is real or not, so let’s take this with a pinch of salt, until we get some concrete proof straight from the horse’s mouth.

How Microsoft plans to make money from Skype is a question many have asked since Microsoft announced intentions back in May 2011 to buy the VOIP vendor for $8,5 billion.

Microsoft execs themselves have been pondering the issue, too, though they’ve given few concrete clues about their intentions.

On December 6, however, Charles Songhurst, General Manager, Corporate Strategy (and the guy who supports Microsoft top brass in analyzing large merger and acquisition transactions, noted during a Q&A session at the NASDAQ OMX Investor Program event in London, did provide a bit of guidance.

Core video chat technology between individual consumers will likely remain free, Songhurst indicated. But some of the Skype video technologies with more corporate appeal — say, capabilities like archiving and authentication — may not.

Here’s a transcript of Songhurst’s answer to an attendee’s question about Microsoft’s Skype strategy, going forward:

«E-mail is a good analogy to the video business. So, if you look at the e-mail industry, the consumer e-mail business has always been one where the core products are given away for free. So, you look at Hotmail and its competitors like Yahoo and Gmail, and then you look at the business side of e-mail. You look at Outlook and you look at its competitors. That’s always been a very good and very profitable business for Microsoft.

«You’re going to see the same dynamic in video where consumer video conversations have the same dynamic as consumer e-mail. It’s a product that is free, and it’s likely to stay free. In the enterprise you’ve got a very compelling opportunity around archiving and authentication. There’s a stat that’s approximately 29 percent of Fortune 500 employees use Skype without it being installed from their CIO. So, if you think about giving the CIO the ability to archive those conversations, to authenticate them, to have the same controls over that conversation that they do over their e-mail, that the employees have, you’d have a very compelling proposition.”

(Songhurst, by the way, is considered to have been CEO Steve Ballmer’s right-hand man in the Skype acquisition.)

Microsoft execs have said they plan to integrate Skype throughout Microsoft’s product line — everywhere from Hotmail and Xbox, to the company’s Lync unified communications server/service and Windows Phone. (A Windows Phone Skype client was on Microsoft’s 2011 delivery list, but still has yet to materialize. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this pushed back to 2012.)

One other interesting tidbit from the transcript of Songhurst’s December 6 remarks: Even Microsoft’s highest-ranking and most influential execs are forbidden from saying almost anything about Windows 8. They can’t even restate or refine Windows 8 information that’s already been shared by the Windows client team.

Songhurst told attendees that Windows 8 was the topic he could say the least about «because we’re very careful in what we say about Windows 8.”

“(W)e really don’t talk about Windows 8,” Songhurst repeated when asked another question which touched on the topic.

Zennström is a Swedish entrepreneur best known for co-founding high-profile online ventures including Skype and music subscription service Kazaa.

In 2006, Zennström founded Atomico, a venture capital firm based in London, which invests in innovative companies with game-changing technology or disruptive business models.

Wrapp has raised $5,5 million in a Series A funding round led by Atomico, with Zennström joining Wrapp’s board of directors. Nordic VC firm Creandum also participated in the round.

Wrapp was founded by Hjalmar Winbladh, the co-founder of mobile internet company Sendit and mobile VoIP company Rebtel. The company has offices in Stockholm and Silicon Valley.

Winbladh created Wrapp with Andreas Ehn, the founding chief technology officer of digital music service Spotify.

Joining them is Carl Fritjofsson, former strategy adviser to Groupon, Aage Reerslev, founder of mobile browser Squace, and Fabian Mansson, former chief executive of H&M and Eddie Bauer.

Inspired by Facebook, Wrapp allows users to give, receive and redeem digital gift cards using mobile devices, while allowing friends to contribute to gifts given by mutual friends.

Offering iPhone, Android and web apps, users sign in via their Facebook account. By tapping the app’s Celebration tab, they can browse friends or events, and select people to send gift cards to.

All available gift card offers for that particular friend are then automatically listed.

The user selects the retailer and the gift card offer they want, writes a greeting, selects a delivery date, enters payment details and sends the gift.

The recipient is then notified via Facebook and the Wrapp application.

For now, Wrapp only operates with retailers in Sweden. However, it says it will use the new funding to expand to the United States and the United Kingdom.

«Sweden validated our belief that people want to make giving gifts of real value among friends an everyday event, and don’t want to limit it to just birthdays, holidays or other big occasions,” Winbladh said in a statement.

«Everyone likes to be recognised and celebrated. Attractive brands are providing the free gift cards. All you have to do is choose one and send it to a friend. No strings attached.”

Meanwhile, US-based shopping discovery app Zoomingo has secured $1,3 million in funding from VC firms Naya Ventures and Benaroya Capital, and several prominent angel investors.

The app pulls in sales data from major retailers using a combination of manual and automated means, as well as crowdsourcing via its «Deal Scouts», which are positioned in major US cities.

Zoomingo was founded by Krishnan Seshadrinathan and Shirish Nadkarni, who also co-founded Livemocha, the world’s largest language learning website with more than 10 million users.

Shirish also founded mobile email pioneer TeamOn, which was acquired by RIM in 2002.

Zoomingo says it will use the additional capital to enhance its current mobile application, build a retailer platform and expand its outreach to customers and retailer partners.

Microsoft reported $5,74 billion in net income for the first fiscal quarter of 2012, up 6 percent from the same period a year ago. The company also reported record revenue of $17,37 billion, up 7 percent from the prior year.

Microsoft said that its SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange revenue collectively grew over ten percent in revenue, with Lync revenue itself growing over 25 percent. Microsoft’s business division pulled in the most revenue of all its business units at $5,62 billion, up 8 percent over 2010. Operating income also increased from $3,47 billion to $3,66 billion.

One of the linchpins of the unit still remains Office 2010, which Microsoft chief financial officer Bill Klein reported was still going strong.

«Despite the best efforts of competitors, Office remains the overwhelming choice for productivity,” Klein said. «We are extremely pleased with the reception for Office 2010 this far into the launch cycle. We’re 15 months post launch, but we still saw an improvement in the consumer PC attach rate for Office in the quarter,” a 7 percent growth in revenue, he said.

From there, Microsoft launched Office 365, an effort to tie Office and cloud services together.

«The early success of Office 365 surpassed our expectations,” Klein added. Because Office 365 is free, Microsoft is seeing smaller businesses spend their budget on bundled services such as SharePoint and Lync, he said.

Going forward, Microsoft’s revenue will include figures for Skype, a deal which Microsoft closed on Oct. 14. Microsoft is in the process of integrating Skype into Lync, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Phone and the Xbox platform, part of the strategy to «connect» consumers that Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer described on stage at the Web 2,0 Summit in San Francisco, slamming Android while defending its social strategy.

As for Microsoft’s position in the phone market, «We are well positioned to become the third mobile ecosystem,” Klein said.

Microsoft still continued to lose money online, although the loss shrank from $558 million to $494 million. Microsoft made $625 million in the unit, up from $527 million a year ago. Bing’s market share now stands at 14,7 percent, a market share increase of 3,5 percentage points since last year.

Microsoft provides search results for Yahoo via its Bing search engine. However, Yahoo has complained previously that the revenue per search is still too low. «It is our number one priority to solve the monetization problem with RPS,” Klein said.

Doing so will solve the profitability problems the unit faces, Klein said, and boost revenues. Online ad revenues were up 21 percent, he said.

Klein said that he believed that the industry was in the «middle innings» of the corporate PC upgrade cycle, and that the industry wouldn’t be too adversely affected from flooding in Thailand, which has put supplies of hard disk drives at risk. «Historically, the global supply chain has been pretty resilient to occurrences like this,” he said.

In the past, the European Commission has been sympathetic to complaints about Microsoft’s strategy of «bundling» popular applications with Windows, eventually requiring the software maker to make concessions on its media player and Internet browser.

But legal experts were split over whether the latest complaint, filed Sept. 20 by Messagenet, a company based in Milan that is a rival to Skype Internet’s phone service, would complicate or prevent European approval of the takeover, which would be the largest in Microsoft’s history and the largest takeover in the technology sector this year.

«These types of complaints from competitors are to be expected,” said Denis Waelbroeck, an antitrust lawyer at Ashurts in Brussels. «I would expect that the commission will look at this seriously, but I think that in the end, the officials will reach their own independent decision. This doesn’t mean the complaint will be upheld.”

Joaquín Almunia, the E.U. competition commissioner, plans to make his decision on the acquisition public on Oct. 7. A spokeswoman for Mr. Almunia, Amelia Torres, on Wednesday declined to comment on Messagenet’s complaint. In general, she said the commission considered all submissions from competitors in antitrust cases.

Mr. Almunia, a Spanish economist, had been competition commissioner for less than two months when his office approved Microsoft’s takeover of Yahoo’s search business in February 2010. A Brussels antitrust lawyer, who did not want to be identified for fear of alienating a potential client in Microsoft, said the Italian complaint could scupper the deal.

«I would certainly say this kind of complaint, if it raises new issues that the commission has not previously considered, may derail the deal or, at least delay approval,” the lawyer said. Mr. Almunia could be persuaded to extend his present review into a more exhaustive second phase, which could take months or even years.

Or, the lawyer said, Microsoft could seek to delay an immediate decision and buy time by requesting an extension to prepare an answer to the complaint. Jesse Verstraete, a spokesman for Microsoft in Brussels, said the company declined to comment on the allegations in the complaint from Messagenet.

«The proposed acquisition is still undergoing regulatory review and we are working closely with the agencies,” Mr. Verstraete said. «Until all regulatory approvals are obtained, it is business as usual at Microsoft and at Skype.”

Besides asking Microsoft to «unbundle» Skype from Windows, Messagenet is urging European competition authorities to require Microsoft to effectively open Skype’s Internet phone network, which had 124 million regular users in June, to the services of rivals. Messagenet is asking the commission to do this by requiring Microsoft to disclose the confidential computer coding that would enable rival services to connect calls to Skype users.

Skype’s communication software does not operate with rival services. In May, after Microsoft announced its plans to buy Skype, the managing director of Messagenet, Andrea M. Galli, said he had written to Skype requesting the secret coding that would let the services interconnect, according to a copy of the complaint that Messagenet filed with the commission, and which was seen by the International Herald Tribune.

Mr. Galli said Skype never responded to the request.

Less than three weeks later, Skype ended its partnership with Digium, a company based in Huntsville, Alabama, whose software had enabled users of an open-source Internet phone service, Asterisk, to call and be called by Skype users.

At that time, a Digium product manager, Rod Montgomery, lamented in a company blog that Skype for Asterisk, the Digium software, had been a «strong and steady seller.»

After Skype canceled the partnership, Digium stopped selling Skype for Asterisk on July 26. Mr. Montgomery said Skype had guaranteed to support and maintain the software for existing users for only two years, honoring a provision in its original contract with Digium.

In his complaint, Mr. Galli said the Digium incident showed Microsoft’s intention to keep Skype as a closed, proprietary software application, unavailable to rivals.

«The first effects of the proposed merger will be an even more rigid approach to interoperability of Skype services so to exclude competitors from the market,” Mr. Galli wrote in the company’s complaint.

The U. S. Federal Trade Commission approved Microsoft’s purchase of Skype on June 17, arguing that, with rival Internet phone operators Google Talk and Apple FaceTime, there was sufficient competition to let Microsoft’s purchase proceed.

But that rationale may be less persuasive in Europe, where none of the big global sellers of Internet video communication services are European companies, and where regulators have a track record of challenging Microsoft’s bundling strategy.

In 2009, under pressure from European officials, Microsoft agreed to distribute a ballot screen on Windows allowing users to choose their default browser from a list of 12, including Windows Internet Explorer.

The agreement settled a complaint that had been filed by a small Norwegian browser maker, Opera, which had attracted support from Google and Mozilla, the makers of the Chrome and Firefox browers, respectively.

The ballot screens, which Microsoft began distributing in early 2010, have sped the erosion of its browser share in Europe. Internet Explorer’s market share in Europe slipped to 46,3 percent in April from 55,7 percent a year earlier, according to AT Internet, a research firm based in Merignac, France. During the same period Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari browser and Opera all gained market share.

In 2007, the commission required Microsoft to sell a version of Windows XP in Europe without its own media player, a condition it imposed to resolve a decade-long legal clash that ended with Microsoft’s being convicted of antitrust violations and paying more than $1 billion in fines and penalties. But that remedy largely failed as European consumers rejected the stripped-down Windows version, which Microsoft was allowed to sell for the same price as the full version.

Are you a Skype user who’s looking for a voice-and-video call recorder, a desktop sharing tool, integration with Outlook, or a free app for sending faxes? No longer need you turn to Google and evaluate apps in the wild, without easy comparison shopping, helpful category distinctions or customer reviews. Like a caveman.

But Skype’s App Directory is currently limited in small yet important ways:

There are only 20 or so apps at the moment, which isn’t exactly the whole Skype ecosystem. The popular call recorder I use isn’t in there, for example. That number, though, should grow over time.
Unlike the Apple, Amazon or Android app stores, Skype’s is really a directory, not a store. You can’t purchase the apps through Skype, but are routed to the developers’ individual sites.

The best analog might be Dropbox’s Apps site, which likewise links out. But unlike Dropbox, Skype has a robust payment-and-credits system to handle its own services. Even though Skype isn’t owned by eBay any more, Skype and PayPal are still pretty well-integrated. Handling payments, refunds and information is a real service Skype could offer both its customers and developers. Not doing it doesn’t make much sense.

Some reasons Skype’s not going the Apple/Amazon/Android route:

It keeps developers happy. They get full access to user and billing information, and users who are tied to them as much as Skype.
The system’s a lot easier to scale if you don’t have to worry about handling payments, both in terms of approving apps and managing the backend.
Skype doesn’t want to use PayPal or credit cards or anything else, but would rather wait until the Microsoft purchase is approved to roll out a 2,0 store using Microsoft’s own payment system.

Whatever the reasons, these limitations are why I call Skype’s a «junior» app platform. It’s still one that’s worth watching. That little platform might grow up&nbsp

According to Skype, that version includes a number of additional updates based on user feedback, but the standout feature remains the deep Facebook integration, which will let you call and IM your friends, update your status, and engage in other Facebook-related activities. Skype is also promising «enhanced video call reliability,” and it’s made yet more design changes that promise to «improve your overall Skype experience.» You can judge that yourself by downloading the application at the link below.

The Act requires that companies file details of proposed deals with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) before being assessed by an anti-trust agency. In cases where the review has been completed and there is no intention to take action to prevent a deal from going ahead, companies can request «early termination», allowing deals to go ahead without waiting for a statutory period of time to pass.

Microsoft announced its intention to buy Skype for $8,5bn in May this year. The move gives the software giant a greater presence in the unified communications market, as it seeks to roll out VoIP and video calling capabilities; Skype claims 170 million connected users of over 200 billion minutes of voice and video conversation in 2010. The acquisition is the largest in Microsoft’s history and comes at a time when, despite significant marketing initiatives, the company has remained something of a laggard behind rivals Google and Facebook in the online space. Redmond’s Bing search offering accounts for 30 per cent market share in America, compared to Google’s 64 per cent.

A tight integration of Skype’s offerings with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, Xbox and Kinect gaming devices and other communications services should see Redmond taking its game to Apple, which has made significant inroads in the video communications space with its Facetime offering. The acquisition of Skype, coupled with Microsoft’s recent deal with Nokia, could help Redmond further develop relationships with carriers in an effort to play catch-up with Apple and Android.

According to Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards, Apple Facetime’s availability on Mac, iPhone 4, iPad 2 and iPod touch mean «it is definitely now or never for Microsoft.» Edwards says that while there are other products and companies out there that offer a better fit architecturally than Skype and come with a lower pricetag, «Skype is undoubtedly the product Microsoft needs to stay in the game…It’s popular, it runs on Windows PCs and later this year it will be available on Windows Phone 7.»