Skype: the “wow” started 5 years ago

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 08 September 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Internet time moves so fast that you can blink, and all of a sudden, Skype has turned 5 years old! Several interesting milestones have been reached along the way, most of which have been pretty remarkable, although there have been a couple of hiccups along the way... It was back on August 29, 2003 that Skype version 1.0 was first launched, Skype says, “unto an unsuspecting world”. Its claim to fame was using p2p (peer to peer) technology to link users together, something that would mean that users could reliably connect with each other to talk. At the time, this was quite revolutionary, because competing programs such as MSN or Yahoo Messenger didn’t always work when you tried to initiate a voice conversation. The fact Skype made that voice connection reliable helped achieve 1.5 million downloads and 100,000 concurrent users by October 22, 2003, less than 8 weeks after its August 29 launch. The software was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and a “skeleton crew of Estonian programmers”, according to Skype’s blog posting “5 years of wow’, with the two co-founders already famous for having unleashed p2p file sharing software Kazaa onto the world. The next 5 years has seen a series of achievements. 2004 saw free conference calls, a Pocket PC version, the birth of SkypeOut to call regular phones from a computer and over 1 million concurrent users. 2005 saw the millionth SkypeOut user, a SkypeIn service giving your Skype account a regular phone number, and the introduction of Skype Voicemail. It was also the year that troubled auction giant eBay acquired Skype for billions of dollars. 2006 saw the launch of Skype for Business, the registration of the 100 millionth Skype user, the first Wi-Fi phones for Skype and, separately, cordless Skype Internet phones. 2007 saw the evolution of Skype phones continue further with the introduction of “desktop Internet phones”, the surpassing of 10 million downloads of the third-party plugins that are Skype Extras, the launch of the “3 Mobile” Skypephone and the leap to “High Quality” videoconferencing sessions when Skype is paired with a fast broadband connection and 2 megapixel Logitech webcams. 2008 celebrated 100 billion “free Skype-to-Skype minutes served”, which Skype says is “one minute for every man, woman and child that has ever walked the Earth”. Skype also lauched “unlimited calling subscriptions to over a third of the world’s population”. The beta of Skype 4.0 was unveiled this year, while the number of registered Skype users (not concurrent users) grew to 338 million. But what hasn’t gone perfectly in the Skype world? Please read on to page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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