Blog: Skype

This morning EBay Inc. said it will buy Skype Technologies SA, for
about $2.6 billion in cash and eBay stock. This is going to be awesome!

 
I will share more later about how I see this as a major opportunity to
take SkypeIn, the VOIP to Telephone paid service Skype offers to
developing countries and give the 'local' monopoly providers a run for
their service.

Skype just finished it's first free
skypeout day where they gave costumers 10 minutes of free skype to
phone talk time. Skype say there will be 4 more days in the
month of July...

This article in the NYT today talks about VoIP's like Skype and the communities they arecreating. I can believe it. Although I don't have my account set to Skype Me, some of my friends do and people skype them. Most so far have been from abroad and have wanted to practice their English, but some just wanted to talk. It will be interesting to see how this changes and evolves over the next few years.

Motorola said this past week at 3GSM World Congress that it will launch a line of “Skype Ready” products in the first half of 2005, including cell phones and handsets. I found this headline on Geek News Central. Also, Todd at Geek News Central has a great podcast if you are into that.

Another example of Skype making serious inroads (besides the 73,639,328 downloads they have at the time this blog was posted) is the new Skype equipped phones. It’s a cordless Skype phone and ordinary landline in one that allows you to move up to 300m (yes that is 3 football fields) away from your PC and make Skype and SkypeOut calls. You can buy one here if you have about $160...

With the invite to try skype “Voice Messaging” (voice mail) I also got two other invites. Gave one to Ian and he should give a cool review back about it... They are totally being like google with gmail:

Still trying to figure out what to do with the last one... know any podcaster out there that wants to review it?

User profiles on messenger are giving marketer an interesting new advertising angle. I was recently spammed on Skype. We are all very use to getting email spam but on messenger it is a little different... Skype has only been around a little over a year and a half but as it's users continue to grow rapidly ( 34,585,727 downloads at time of writing) it of couse is becoming a magnet for marketers.

The message is written very informally, similar to an IM with some classic text abbreviation's and they address me by first name and know I live in DC... I wonder how automated this is?

Does anyone have any that you would like to share?
Well here is my recent spam for you all to laugh at..


puronyrican dice : 17:46:59