If you have friends and family overseas, you’ll know that Skype is a pretty convenient tool to communicate with them for free or at a relatively low cost. You’re also one of already 663 million registered Skype users.
Skype celebrates it’s eleventh birthday this year and was developed as a voice-over IP and instant messaging service by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden. Friis and Zennström came up with Skype by combining the two words – sky and peer.
Microsoft became the owners of Skype in 2011 at the significant cost of $8.5 billion. However, the head offices aren’t located in America as one would expect, but in Luxembourg and the largest part of Skype’s development team and 44 % of it’s staff os located in Tallinn and Tartu in Estonia.
Skype enables you to communicate with anyone through earphones, via video with a webcam or by typing instant messsages. Calls to other Skype users are free, while land line and cellphone calls are debited from your account.
Other than these usual functions, it can also be used for file transfers and group video calling. Until recently group video calling has only been available at a cost to premium users, but luckily this has changed and the service is now free to all Skype users.
Skype video calling gives you the opportunity to make group calls to a maximum of 9 people at the same time with a webcam. If you want to use this new, free function, you can read more about it on the Skype website.
Tags: skype