Word: skype
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Instant messaging is already well established, of course. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL (owned by TIME's parent company, Time Warner) have offered it for years. And Net telephony provider Skype has 51 million people using its system. So why would Google, with an $80 billion empire built entirely on search, bother playing catch-up on a product that seems unlikely to earn it much money? The same reason a hotel offers free wi-fi, says Scott Cleland, CEO of Precursor, an investment research firm. "They're not doing it to make money on wi-fi. It's to get people...
Surely over the next few years Harvard students and others will follow suit, adopting en masse software like Skype, a sort of VoIP-meets-instant-message program allowing free high quality real-time voice chat with other Skype users. The real goal, however, is not to improve our blocking group dinner coordination systems. Rather, it’s to ensure that some time down the road, VoIP will take telecommunications in the third world and, despite the odds, render it from a convoluted and corruption-riddled endeavor into a foregone conclusion the whole world enjoys without a second thought...
...first time that Zennstrom has pursued a counterintuitive business model. In 2000 he and Skype co-founder Janus Friis launched Kazaa, a peer-to-peer exchange that allowed users to swap music and videos online. Now Zennstrom is at the vanguard of voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), a technology that lets voice traffic travel over the Internet. Gartner Inc. analyst Katja Ruud estimates that about 100 million people worldwide will use VOIP by 2008. Even telecom giants like AT&T, BT Group and Verizon realize they have to offer VOIP. Zennstrom practices extreme VOIP: free calls and free software...
Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friiss have already shaken the music industry to its roots with their Kazaa file-sharing software. Now Zennstrom, 37, and Friiss, 27, have turned their attention to another industry: telephony. The duo's new creation is known as Skype, and they hope it will do for phone calls what Kazaa, which lets millions of users get songs for free, did for file sharing. Download Skype's software www.skype.com and buy a $15 headset, and you can make free phone calls worldwide to anyone else who has installed Skype. Like Kazaa, the system...
...improving. Zennstrom and Friiss say Skype users will be able to call anyone--non-Skype users included--in 2004. The pair plan to make the business profitable by charging for services such as call waiting, multiple lines and voice mail. More than 2.5 million copies of the basic program have been downloaded since its August release...