Skype Files $100M IPO
streetinsider.com
streetinsider.com
Very common for me.
Also common are VOIP conference lines where everybody dials in.
When someone says "let's Skype" in my world, they either mean Skype-to-Skype (which is implicit if they are in your Skype contacts) or Skype-to-VOIP using one of our VoSky appliances that's tied into our PBXes. The verb "to call" is almost meaningless these days.
My wife does. Oprah's been skyping in and out of viewer homes for months.
Also, two Galaxy S phones were released in mid-July, less than one month ago.
regardless, though, i think my original point still stands. skype hasn't been stagnant, they're making some moves.
Serious question: any idea how? Everything I've read says it's limited to Verizon handsets, even when trying to install the .apk manually. I'd love to have Skype on my Vibrant.
Does this mean the stocks will jump sky high the second it's on the market?
I don't know how much of Skype is being sold, but here's an example from Wikipedia:
"Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place."
Good for them and all their investors, I think it's one of the most useful tools to have been created in the last 10 years.
If they had ipo'd a decade earlier they might not have made as much as they did.
investors, I wouldn't go anywhere near this stock. you'll get burned.
And shrewd isn't a compliment either, but some would think that's positive. (I'm not one of them)
You mean Ma Bell?
SIP, STUN, RTP, XMPP, Jingle, all these are recognizable open protocols. Skype, if they were truly interested in not being a walled-garden, would have either built or migrated to a network based on these.
Skype will be dead in 10 years if Apple makes good on their promise to keep Facetime open.
Relatedly, if Skype changes the protocol, does it break an installed base of clients, or do those get updated automagically?
a more ideal solution involves decentralization. do you trust a single service provider?
The kazaa code did that pretty good and Friis and Zennstrom figured a way to monetize their bag of tricks they'd created while creating kazaa. Remember how they sold off Kazaa but kept the fire-wall penetrating technology by licensing it back to the buyer (Joltid), then later they did the same thing with ebay and skype.
Given that they'd already pulled that one once before ebay was really pretty stupid to fall for it.
Skype does much better than that. AFAIK they can traverse NATs and firewalls that don't support UPnP; they can fall back to TCP if UDP doesn't work; if all else fails they have a network of supernodes to relay traffic.
I'm just saying that everything skype does can be done with OSS using open standards. That skype is in any way technologically superior is mostly result of excessive FUD campaigns IMHO. :)
The quality is high, it's highly accessible and it doesn't have an equal competitor. Even the instant messaging services that do voice and video are poor alternatives. It has also been used for several years by feature phones and smart phones - some as their main selling point.
Essentially, its a pseudo standard used by most people.
Windows: Delphi Linux: C++ OS X: Objective-C
Putting the good 'ol American dollar in good investment overseas. I'm happy for Skype, but this act doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Why exactly?
It may not be perfect but it's pretty darn good and it Just Works. It is almost ubiquitous and the company name has become a verb for a large segment of the popultion. "Let's Skype!"