Just last week I was browsing through a piece in Fortune 100 and found out about this thing I had never heard of before called skype. The two guys who started up skype are now rich beyond their craziest expectations. In due course they sold their brainwave ebay. If you havent heard of skype then you are probably wondering what I am going on about. A lot of people call it voip which is an acronym for voice over internet protocol. The idea is not new, you basically cam make phone calls over the internet for free. So all you have to do is rig up a phone to your pc and you can see and talk to anyone anywhere in the world using skipe. It is essential you get a rapid broadband connection as quickly as you can. Fantastic voice quality is not guaranteed however if your connection is slow. Trying to use skype if you are on a dial up modem is next to impossible as the voice on the other end of the line continually breaks up and it can be very frustrating. Interstingly enough due to skypes huge success big commercial telephone companies are trying to get a foothold in the marketplace. I guess the question remains, is it commercially viable. Will it take on the net by storm, or is it just a passing fad. The answer is simply time will tell. None of us can predict the future but if you look at the amount of people who use skype on a daily basis you will see millions of people using skype at the same time. If previous experience is anything to go by then we can expect the big players to look at voip and skyp in minute detail. The most plausible scenario is that the federal govt will want a piece of the action by regulating it. If there is ever an opportunity to make big bucks from something that is free and that millions of people have access to, then you can be sure that the government will find a way to get a slice of the action. At the moment skype makes its money by charging people who phone land lines from their pc who use skipe. It seems like voice over interet protocol and skyp is also at the forefront of web video conferencing as well. With 911 happenning in the not too distant past more people want to travel less and less so it is a great opportunity for voip to put video conferencing back on the map. Attaching a webcam to your computer is the easiest way for people to see each other online. If you consider yourself a technophobe, then that isn't a problem either as many pcs being sold on the market have inbuilt webcams so you dont have to connect anything. Audio and video are becoming possible for everyone nowadays-in this day and age especially with the massive success of youtube. Many people think video and audio will be a passing fad but all the evidence points in the other direction. Over the next 5 years we will see whether skype and voip takes off in the way many gurus predict. We'll see in the next few years.
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