appear.in – your friendly Skype replacement

Every day some new super hyped web service is born, and every other day some old web service is decommissioned. It’s been going on for so long, that rarely do I pay much attention to these things.  I need a few recommendations. I want to hear excitement. I want to hear why and how this can be useful to me.  A mere press release doesn’t cut it.

Today, I was recommended a service that is so easy and useful that it blew my mind.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you appear.in .  Think of the all the good things Skype is, without all the bad things that come with it.  Video, voice, and text chat, screen sharing, free, multiple participants (up to 8), private and public conversations, excellent voice and video quality, and no installation of software necessary – works right out of the browser, even on the mobile.

appear.in

It’s so easy and fun to use that I’ve spent most of the day chatting to my colleagues even when they were in the same room.  We had two and three way conversations with screen sharing and text messages (handy for the URLs) and it worked really well.

Come to think of it, the only thing that I didn’t see (maybe it’s there and maybe it’s not) is file transfer.  But there are so many different ways these days to send a file that I don’t worry about that too much.  A quality video chat with screen sharing is a different ball game altogether.

Enjoy!

Cyprus Tax, Facts & Figures 2016

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published their annual Cyprus tax, facts and figures brochure for the year 2016. It is a handy document to send to friends abroad who are interested in moving to Cyprus or starting a business here.

One thing that I found ironic in this document was the example they used for personal taxation (page 7-8 in the English PDF).  The example is for someone with a monthly salary of 5,885 EUR and additional income from rent, etc – a total income of 75,620 EUR per annum.  Looking at the average salary in European Union, Cyprus shows 1,833 EUR per month in 2014 and 1,574 EUR per month in 2015.

I hope PwC predicts a huge spike in average salaries in 2016.  That would be nice …