A Skype call acts like an incoming cellular phone. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Skype's VoIP app is "coming soon" for Windows Phone 8, but when it arrives, it'll be outfitted with more options than its Skype sibling for Windows Phone 7.5.

Written in native code, the app integrates into your address book and partially into the dialer, so you can receive incoming Skype calls the same way you would receive a cellular call. You'll be able to answer with a video chat in addition to voice. Skype contacts also integrate into your address book, so you can find your buddies from your contacts screen, not solely from the app.

To field your calls, Skype is always receptive, through a backend notification system that is designed not to drain battery.

There are some new features as well as old favorites. Like the version for Windows 8, Skype for WP8 adds a new screen for favorite contacts. Group chat also makes its debut. Skype emoticons are all there as well, and support for Skype Credit means you'll be able to call friends from overseas. If someone IMs you during a video call, you'll be able to respond, or move the bubble aside, without crashing your call.

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Hot on the heels of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's revelation that Microsoft has sold more than 4 million copies of Windows 8, PayPal has unveiled today a Windows 8 developer API

The PayPal API lets developers tie in-app purchases to PayPal, which claims more than 100 million active accounts. Microsoft pointed to the free Crowdstar game Fish With Attitude as an example of a Windows Store app that uses PayPal for in-app purchases of game characters.

The API lets people pay from a more familiar, better-established system than Microsoft's neophyte in-house one. This isn't Microsoft's first Windows 8 connection to PayPal, as the service is available to use when purchasing the Windows 8 upgrade.

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You might think developing technology standards is plodding, bureaucratic tedium compared to something like the frenzy of smartphone innovation.

But you'd be wrong, at least in the case of Paul Cotton, who leads Microsoft's involvement in the important and often fractious world of Web standards. Web standards are hot -- and hotly contested.

Paul Cotton, leader of Microsoft's Web standards work and a co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group

(Credit: Microsoft)

Cotton, an even-keeled Canadian, discovered a passion for standards more than 20 years ago when figuring out how to digitize airplane maintenance manuals. He's comfortable with the contradictory motives of standards groups: fierce competition one moment and gentlemanly cooperation the next.

It's a good mindset for the debates shaping the Web, which is the world's most important publishing medium and could become the world's most important software foundation, too.

This is no easy job. For years, Microsoft sidelined itself from the world of Web standards. Internet Explorer, especially the now-despised IE6, exemplified how spurning standards held back the Web.

But Microsoft has performed an about-face. With IE9, the company embraced a wide range of standards and jump-started the move toward hardware-accelerated graphics and text, a move that helped usher in high-performance Web games such as ... [Read more]

Instagram users are already documenting the coming "Frankenstorm" with filters a-flying.

(Credit: Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET - Instagram/Beizmindi)

Hurricane Sandy is poised to become the superstorm of the century as it looks to go for a stroll across the Atlantic seaboard and right into the middle of America's largest metropolis. In the process, and certainly a bit perversely, this unholy marriage of a tropical storm and a Nor'easter is shaping up to be a feather in the cap of Instagram.

The photo-sharing app that Facebook snapped up earlier this year is reporting that users have already uploaded and tagged hundreds of thousands of photos related to Hurricane Sandy:

The Instagram community has been sharing photos from the storm-at a rate of nearly 10 each second-with the hashtags #hurricanesandy, #sandy and #frankenstorm.

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