Skype Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Skype - Essay Example right blend of a sound business vision and an exclusive access to the relevant technologies will dominate the economies in the times to come (Amor 2008: p.4). Since, in today’s info savvy world, every financial venture has a technological aspect associated with it, therefore the converse is also true. That is, every innovative technology has a commercial value associated with it, the right and timely exploitation of which can work wonders for a business. Skype is one such e-business that is based on the exploitation of the synergies existing between business and technology. Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis in the year 2003 (Skype 2009). The ingenuity of Skype lied in inventing software that enabled its customers to make telephone calls via internet, anywhere in the world by paying a reasonable fee. Besides this, Skype offered additional features as file transfer, instant messaging and video conferencing. Thus Skype represented the long awaited convergence between the regular telephonic technology and the internet, which offered both the features of a regular telephone and the internet assisted communication. The headquarters of Skype are based at Luxembourg, with supporting administrative and software development facilities scattered all across the world. The USP of Skype lies in offering economical voice and video calls by means of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) (Ravindran 2008). Over the time, the accessibility of Skype has been extended to both the landline and cellular phones (Ravindran 2008). According to Chris Lewis, the head of strategy at Skype, right now Skype is vowing reputed hardware manufacturers like Nokia so as to expand the range of platforms from which their services can be accessed (Ravindran 2008). The ultimate cherry over the cake is that at Skype, Skype-to-Skype calls are offered for free (Ravindran 2008). It is not so with other VoIP providers. Thus this prerogative allows the businesses and individuals to save