Skype has announced today that 30 million users were online today concurrently, a new record for the service.

Says the company:

A few hours ago, Skype passed a new milestone. There were 30 million people, online on Skype, at the same time.

As we cut the (blue) cake at Skype HQ, it's a good opportunity to remind you that if there's someone in your life who doesn't use Skype, there's never been a better time to tell them about all the wonderful things you can do – video calling on computers, mobiles and TVs, great value calls to phones, instant messaging, sending files and more.

The milestone is good news for the service, which saw its second-longest outage, ever, in December with most of its users being unable to access the service for just over 24 hours.

Skype ended up crediting every paying user $1 for the down time.

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Google may be looking to LG to create a Nexus tablet, says Crunchgear, following their Nexus One and Nexus S flagship 'superphones.'

Although unconfirmed, a Nexus tablet would be logical, given the popularity amongst developers for the Nexus One and Nexus S.

Nexus devices each offer fully 'vanilla' experiences, meaning no third-party software from manufacturers or carriers, like UI overlays.

If true, the LG Nexus would run on Android 3.0 (or possibly an update like 3.1) and be free of all software issues that 3.0 users have been experiencing with the Motorola Xoom.

By choosing LG, VB speculates that Google is "helping the company to deliver better Android products in the future."

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As of 2pm today, the New York Times paywall is now live, meaning you will need to subscribe to the newspaper to have unlimited access to articles online.

All readers get access to 20 stories per month for free, and some free articles via the Time's mobile app. $15 gets you unlimited access to the site and the phone app. $20 gets you online access and unlimited use of the iPad app. $35 per month gets you unlimited access to everything the Times offers.

If you are a print subscriber, you have unlimited access to everything, as well.

There are many ways around the paywall, including clicking through to the content via Twitter and Facebook. One coder even created an add-on called NYTClean which breaks through the paywall with just 4 lines of code.

Acknowledging their are many loopholes, the company still believes users will pay for access: "We believe that enough people will pay, but we will not cut ourselves off from the rest."

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According to well-connected Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple, the company will not release a new iPhone at this year's June's Worldwide Developers Conference.

Instead, the event will be fully for new software updates and launches and not hardware.

Says Apple's release about the event:

At this year's conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS. If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.

That press release implies that Apple will give more details about OS X Lion (10.7) and iOS 5.

Because of February's CDMA iPhone 4 launch, the iPhone 5 launch will likely be pushed back until the fall, possibly September.

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The Nintendo 3DS launched this weekend in Europe and North America but there have already been numerous reports of a "Black Screen of Death," an strange error in the handheld.

If you receive the error, you are prompted to call Nintendo for support.

Reads the full error (via Soft):

An error has occurred. Hold down the Power button to turn off power, then turn it on and try again. If the problem persists, please contact your local customer support center.

The worst part of the error is it is still unclear what triggers it, and it appears that the error screen is frequent for some users.

Nintendo did respond, but it was not very revealing:

Our recommendations are that if anyone is experiencing any problems with their Nintendo 3DS console, we recommend that in the first instance they download and install the latest system update, now available online. If the problems still persist we recommend they contact their local Nintendo Customer Service centre to investigate the problem.

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Today we celebrate our discussion forums' 10th birthday.

It was exactly ten years ago today when the first public post was made to our forums. Since that post, more than 3.6 million messages have been posted to our forums -- and an additional 1.4 million posts to our Finnish language forums.

To celebrate the moment, here's our "Top 10 all-time" forum poster chart (excluding moderators and admins):

1. sammorris
2. sc0user
3. larrylje
4. steimy
5. sly_61019
6. attar
7. arniebear
8. Rotary
9. gwendolin
10. NoLimit04

I'd like to thank all of our users, no matter what your post count or forum "title" is, for keeping our forums alive and kicking for more than a decade. Thank you!

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com

P.S. We're running small "clearance of our storage room" project and as a result of that, we'll send out AfterDawn branded stuff, like towels, to a randomly picked forum poster every day during the next 14 days.

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