Skype look back on the first five years

September 19, 2008

Scott Durchslag & Josh Silverman
Scott Durchslag & Josh Silverman
@ Skype’s 5th Birthday Party

Skype held a party at the Absolut Ice Bar in London last night to mark their fifth birthday. Josh Silverman, Skype CEO, and Scott Durchslag, Skype COO, were both in London for the event.

On show were many of Skype’s latest innovations, including a demonstration of the Skype 4.2 beta. This should be ready for release in the near future and builds on Skype 4.0 beta with a tabbed view for managing calls, chats and contacts. A welcome addition for many Skype 3.0 users is the ability to reduce the window size. Skype 4 will be all about making Skype easier and more intuitive to use and it looks like they’re succeeding.

Josh spoke of the history of Skype and his vision for the future where telephony is no longer in the grasp of the traditional telephone companies but is a software product functioning across multiple devices and your phone presence can follow you from work, to the car to home jumping from your PC to your mobile to your TV without interruption.


 

Of course no party would be complete without cake, and TameBay managed to grab a Skype birthday cake which we’re auctioning on eBay for charity. If you want to bid all proceeds will go to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and there’s a Skype voucher for 3 months of unlimited landline calls to 36 countries included in the auction.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Featured, News | Comments Off 

Skype gets ex Motorola exec as new COO

July 1, 2008

Skype have just announced the appointment of Scott Durchslag as Chief Operating Officer reporting directly to Josh Silverman. Durchslag left Motorola as their Corporate Vice-President of Global Product & Experience Invention and previously Motorola’s General Manager of South Asia.

In his press statement Duschslag tells how he believes in Skype having used it from the start but then goes on to tell how Skype can save the world by “enabling smaller businesses to grow without the unnecessary fuel consumption, costs and carbon pollution generated by needless travel”. A little overstated perhaps, but it can’t be denied that Skype is a cost effective convenient means of communication and he says it’s a “privilege to join the Skype team and help to build a great company”.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under News | 4 Comments