It's not entirely ontopic, but might help someone in China anyway; we have been looking for an alternative to Skype for a few weeks now. We are using Skype for communication between our offices because it is easy. Now someone told me to try imo.im for on the road, so I tried it out on my desktop (in Chrome) first; my Macbook pro NEVER had more than around 2.5 hours battery life since I bought it. I was already shouting I will never buy Apple again; I NEED long battery life. Skype client almost never was on top in top, so I never thought about it, but once I shutdown Skype and used imo my battery life jumped to over 6 hours. True story. I asked others to test and they have the same experience. This is a great show of the efficiency of the imo.im web client (it's for instance far lighter than gmail, even with 8 chat accounts (I even put my ICQ back :) open with active chatting). Anyway; i'm drifting off.

For speech/video, Skype client is much better than imo, so we still need an alternative for that and although I can find stuff myself; it is either not cross platform (we need Win, Lin, Mac, Android and iOS), too new (not working) or completely impossible to install (not all people using the client are computer wizards). Maybe someone here can advise something for a work situation where we have 3 offices in different EU locations which need to communicate all day with sight and sound? And encrypted ofcourse. After my Skype experience, open source is preferred.

Edit: thanks for Jitsi! Didn't know that one.