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| Skype Logo |
Skype was first released in August 2003. It was written by developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn (Estonia), Janus Friis (Denmark) and Niklas Zennström (Sweden) who had also originally developed Kazaa.Skype had 663 million registered users as of the end of 2010. It was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Microsoft's Skype division headquarters is in Luxembourg, but most of the development team and 44% of the overall employees of the division are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.
The service allows users to communicate with peers by voice using a microphone, video by using a webcam, and instant messaging
over the Internet. Phone calls may be placed to recipients on the
traditional telephone networks. Calls to other users within the Skype
service are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged via a debit-based user account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features, including file transfer, and videoconferencing. Competitors include SIP and H.323-based services, such as Linphoneand Google Hangouts.
Unlike most other VoIP services, Skype is a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software, and this is reflected in Skype's original proposed name of Sky Peer-to-Peer.
Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home and education networks, citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage, and security concerns.
Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden. The Skype software was created by the Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003.
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| Niklas Zennström |
In June 2005, Skype entered into an agreement with the Polish web portal Onet.pl.[citation needed] On 12 September 2007, eBay Inc. agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA for approximately US$2.5 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.
On 1 September 2009, it was announced that eBay was selling 65% of
Skype to Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan
Investment Board for US$1.9 billion, valuing Skype at US$2.75 billion.
In January 2011, after the release of video calling on the Skype
client for iPhone, Skype reached a record 27 million simultaneous online
users. This record was broken with 29 million simultaneous online users on 21 February 2011, and again on 28 March 2011 with 30 million online users. On 25 February 2012, Skype announced that it has over 32 million users for the first time ever. As of 5 March 2012, it has broken to 36 million simultaneous online users and less than a year later, on 21 January 2013, Skype had more than 50 million concurrent users online.In June 2012, Skype had surpassed 70 million downloads on an Android Device.
On 19 July 2012, Microsoft announced that Skype users had logged 115
billion minutes of calls over the quarter, up 50% since the last
quarter.
THIS IS THE TABLE OF SKYPE STATISTIC AND FACTS!
| Skype Statistics | |
| Total number of Skype users as of Jan. 2012 | 31 million |
| Average time spent on a Skype conversation | 27 minutes |
| Number of time that active Skype users spend on Skype per month | 100 minutes |
| Total percentage of small businesses that use Skype as primary communication service | 35% |
| Number Skype enabled television sets | 50 million |
| Number of iphone Skype downloads in 2010 | 7 million |
| Number of people who have ever used Skype | 560 million |
| Total percentage of Skype calls that are video to video | 40% |
| Average spent yearly by a paying Skype user | $96 |
| Skype revenue in 2010 | $406.2 million |
| Number of monthly log-ins to Skype | 124 million |
| Number of monthly paying Skype users | 8.1 million |
| Amount of money spent by Microsoft to acquire Skype | $8.5 billion |
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
"Another differentiator is that skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free"
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