Skpe
Introduction
In 2003 founders of Kazaa, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, lunched peer-to-peer voice over Internet protocol -Skype. At the beginning Skype, acquired by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, was a small company with 200 employees with the main office in Luxemburg and two offices in London and Tallinn, Estonia.
All the previous VoIP services were based on client-server architecture and Skype relied on peer-to-peer architecture that was a progress because that meant distribution of user directory among network peers with no expensive centralized server infrastructure.
The basic founder’s idea was to enable free phone services that are going to work over Internet. Skype as a new way of communication allowed free PC-to-PC calls, sending video and text messages and file sharing over Internet. There was also available SkypeOut service that allowed PC-to-Phone calls at lower cost (2 euro cents per minute), and SkypeIn service that made possible calling a PC from a regular phone with a yearly subscription of 30 euros. The founders new the fact that very big percent of the population who use traditional phone have huge phone bills caused by many expensive international calls. That was enough to get an idea of introducing a new free phone services. All the potential users should have had was the Internet and installed Skype software for Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Pocket PC.
Even though Skype have had its website where users could download the software, they didn’t spend any money on marketing. They actually trusted in word of mouth marketing at least for the basic free services. And the idea brought a positive result so Skype at the moment when was acquired by eBay had 54 million users and 2.7 million premium service customers.
Now we can say that Skype has a community that consists of loyal users who now can search for others to chat in foreign languages and the businesses that can be...
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