For Skype, 2011 is undoubtedly going to be a pivotal year. The VoIP giant is preparing to go public, and armed with a new CEO, Skype is looking to add new products for both its consumer and enterprise businesses and boost revenue. Already, Skype launched video chat capability to its iPhone app, acquired mobile streaming startup Qik, and launched paid group video functionality to its enterprise offerings. While we’ve heard about the company’s enterprise strategy, we have not yet uncovered the details of Skype’s long-term consumer strategy. Skype GM of Consumer Neil Stevens spoke to TechCrunch about the VoIP company’s goals when it comes to expanding its consumer user base, product roadmap and revenue plans.
When asked what the most important product strategy is for Skype in 2011, Stevens was quick to reply that video, especially on mobile devices, is going to be a significant area of development for the company. At any given time Skype now has 28 million simultaneous users (which is up from 27 million reported in early January), with 42 percent of these users engaging in video calls. While Skype has video functionality on its Windows, Mac and now iPhone clients, there is still much more to come in 2011 says Stevens. → Read More
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Skype’s IPO is being pushed back to the second half of 2011. Last August, Skype filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company’s newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype “in better shape.”
From the Wall Street Journal report: “Tony needs to get his feet underneath him and understand the business and the voice of the company,” another person familiar with the matter said. “The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go.” The additional time may help Mr. Bates to get Skype in better shape and increase its value ahead of an offering. But there is also the risk the IPO market weakens, hurting Skype’s chance to go public or depressing the value of the company. → Read More
Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that it would be blocking the Skype toolbar add-on in all versions of its Firefox browser.
While this concerns an impending ‘soft block’, meaning users will be able to re-enable the add-on if they choose to do so, Skype is keen to point out users should always install the most recent version of its desktop client in order to avoid compatibility issues. → Read More
It’s been a big week for Skype. The company launched video chat capability to its iPhone app last week and announced the acquisition of mobile video startup Qik today. The company has made another announcement, launching group calling functionality to its business offering for Windows PCs (the feature had previously been added to its consumer clients for Mac and Windows computers last year).
The new version of Skype for enterprise allows businesses to have video calls with up to 10 concurrent participants, adding to the client’s existing chat, screen sharing and conference call features. Group Video Calling for businesses is available from Skype for $8.99 per user per month. → Read More
It looks like Skype has just picked up mobile video startup Qik. According to a release, Skype has entered an agreement to buy the startup. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but sources tell Business Insider that deal was around $150 million. We’ve embedded the release below.
At last count, Qik, which enables mobile phones users to record and stream videos in realtime, has 5 million users. → Read More
We’ve been hearing reports that Skype is debuting a mobile video chat service and D-Day has arrived. The company is launching a brand new version of its iPhone app that includes the ability to turn on video in any Skype chat.
The beauty of the app is that it brings free video calling to iPhone 3G devices, iPad and iPod Touch, all of which couldn’t run Apple’s video calling feature Facetime (the feature only works with iPhone 4 devices and Mac computers). Of course, iPad owners won’t be able to initiate a video call, but these users can receive any video chats from contacts. → Read More
After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong.
One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152). → Read More
Poor Skype. A mere day after its key consumer service suffered a major outage, affecting tens of millions of users for hours on end, a patent infringement lawsuit against the company was filed in the United States. Plaintiff is the obscure Gradient Enterprises, a non-practicing entity (also lovingly known as an “obnoxious patent troll” in some parts).
The patent-in-suit is U.S. patent no. 7,669,207, entitled “METHOD FOR DETECTING, REPORTING AND RESPONDING TO NETWORK NODE-LEVEL EVENTS AND A SYSTEM THEREOF”. → Read More
Skype is still recovering from its massive outage yesterday, but it is getting back to normal. Instant messages still seem to have a delay (anecdotally, I am noticing that I hear the IM ping, but then it is hit or miss whether any message comes through), but voice calls are working fine. I know because I just spoke with CEO Tony Bates over Skype. He estimates that between 16 million and 17 million Skype users, or about 80 percent of the people who would be on the service right now, can use it. “We are bringing folks back on in a controlled manner,” he says.
Bates priority is to get the service back up and running and to make sure Skype does not lose the trust of its users. To rectify that, he is publicly apologizing to them for the downtime and will offer users some sort of credits, with more details on that coming out later today. (Yes, free calls!) This is the right approach, and reminds me of what Netflix does when its streaming movie service goes down (free movies). → Read More
Skype users has been experiencing a lot of connection problems in the past day or so, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. The service is now slowly crawling back into the land of the living.
The Skype team has been doing a pretty good job keeping people informed about the problems, although they’ve been unable to say when service will be restored for everyone.
The company has just announced that an estimated 10 million people are now back online, although they’re unable to obtain an exact figure because of the way the software works. → Read More
Twitter is down. Skype is down. Tumblr is down. Facebook is down. Twitter is down again.You can base an entire tech reporting career around writing these types of posts. Because if you’re like me and millions of other users right now, you can’t access your Skype account because of a network connection failure.
And like electricity or Internet, I need Skype to do my job well. → Read More
Breaking: Skype appears to have gone down. We’re trying to ascertain why and get comment from the company. However, as of this moment Skype is not working for millions of users, and the angst is playing out on Twitter right now.
Of course what’s so funny is that so many of us now use Twitter DM (direct message) and perhaps even Facebook IM as a sort of alternative “Skype-a-like” IM platform that there are now potential alternatives. It looks like for now that Skype has huge issues though – and it’s coming at a delicate time for the company as it tries to forge path independent from former owner eBay. → Read More
Earlier today we broke the news that Skype was ramping up in preparation for new web-based products — a big shift for the company, which has historically offered its extremely popular service via native desktop clients.
Now we’ve heard more details from one source about what this new service may entail. We’re still working to firm up the specifics, but here’s what we’ve gathered so far:
According to our source, Skype is hoping to launch its web-based service in the first quarter of next year. The launch will likely include integrations on multiple partner sites — Skype is gunning for some big partners, and we hear that LinkedIn has been in discussions about a possible integration (LinkedIn declined to comment). → Read More
As Skype prepares for an IPO in the next year, the VoIP company has been looking for new ways to expand its business both in terms of revenue and product development. One avenue the company is exploring to bring in more revenue is through enterprise offerings, via B2C and B2B offerings. However, it looks like Skype will be moving its VoIP offerings to the cloud.
We spotted these job postings on Skype’s website, indicating that the company is looking to build a team of cloud and web technology engineers. According to the postings, these staff members will “build an infrastructure capable of supporting hundreds of millions of users.” The products, will deliver “voice, vide → Read More
Why don’t more big Web companies come out of Europe? According to European investor Klaus Hommels, it’s not the usual excuses we hear like un-start-up-friendly labor laws or a culture against taking business risk. It’s that the European Union is just too fragmented of a market no matter what continent boosters would have us believe. Hommels explains in the video below– realizing full-well he’s another German likely getting some hate mail from our readers.
While I had Hommels on Skype, which he invested in, I had to ask him about his other notorious Swedish investment, Spotify. Rumors are swirling for the countless time in last two years that the company has finally gotten the labels on board and a US launch is imminent. I’ll believe it when I see it, but kudos to them if they’ve finally pulled it. → Read More
Today sees the launch of Viber, a brand new, free iPhone application (iTunes link, or search for ‘viber free’) that basically functions the way pretty much every iPhone user wishes Skype’s mobile application would. My educated guess is that this will become a stunningly big hit in no time.
Viber for iPhone allows you to make 100% free calls to other Viber users over 3G and WiFi, is capable of running completely in the background without draining your battery (even when the app isn’t actually running in the background, but more on that later), works over Bluetooth and still manages to boast both speedy call connections and excellent audio quality.
Everyone who has an iPhone will want this app – and no, I’m not getting paid by the company to write this, I’m just terribly excited. → Read More
Group video calling on Skype is now available in the new Skype 5.0 Beta for Macs, which just rolled out this morning. Skype 5.0 for Windows came out only a couple weeks ago, and it is already here for Mac.
The overall interface is much cleaner. Conversations get pushed up to the top of the sidebar based on most recent chats. I’m not sure if this is new or not, but in the version of Skype I just upgraded from, conversations stayed where they were, and I always had to scroll up and down among more than 100 open conversations to find the person talking to me (I use Skype mostly as an IM client). → Read More
In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service WorkSnug is partnering with Skype to help mobile workers locate Skype Access-supported WiFi locations in coffee shops using its augmented reality app for iPhone.
Skype Access lets users pay for WiFi on a per-minute basis using their Skype credentials and credit at 200,000 hotspots, provided by the likes of BT Openzone, Boingo, and Barnes & Noble. While WorkSnug’s iPhone app and service helps mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces etc. – and provides ratings on such things as Internet connectivity, “community feel”, power sockets, and, more to the point, the quality of coffee. → Read More
In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service WorkSnug is partnering with Skype to help mobile workers locate Skype Access-supported WiFi locations in coffee shops using its augmented reality app for iPhone.
Skype Access lets users pay for WiFi on a per-minute basis using their Skype credentials and credit at 200,000 hotspots, provided by the likes of BT Openzone, Boingo, and Barnes & Noble. While WorkSnug’s iPhone app and service helps mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces etc. – and provides ratings on such things as Internet connectivity, “community feel”, power sockets, and, more to the point, the quality of coffee. → Read More
Exclusive: Nimbuzz, a popular mobile communication service provider, has been asked by Skype to remove support for all Skype services, effective October 31st. The startup will be announcing the news to its 30 million or so registered users later today.
Nimbuzz sees the decision to ask for the removal of support for Skype services in line with the communication software giant’s “mandate to disconnect with all third-party VoIP services ahead of its impending IPO“. Skype, in turn, calls bullshit and claims Nimbuzz simply stopped communicating with them quite recently, following several months of discussions about Nimbuzz’ compliance with its API Terms of Use and End User Licence Agreement. → Read More
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