Thursday will be ten years since Skype began operating worldwide. The name 'skype' has become a verb, a distinction shared by a few, such as Google and Xerox. And above all, Skype has abolished that 'tyranny of distance' which makes communications difficult and/or expensive. A contribution, that of Skype, all the more important in a world in which immigration, legal or illegal, has become ever more frequent and intense, and therefore the distances between families have lengthened, between those residing in a distant country and who left children, spouses or friends in their country of origin.
Skype, by lowering or in many cases canceling the cost of conversations and, above all, by adding video to audio, has allowed a previously unthinkable level of family and social communication. Today Skype, launched by two telecommunications engineers (one Swedish, the other Danish) at the end of August 2003, has 300 million users, who use two billion minutes of video calls every day.
Attachments: The Economic Times – Skype marks 10 years of shrinking the world
