Friday, November 04, 2005

Long Live Skype

This is the coolest thing that I have ever seen.  It is a VOIP program called SKYPE (www.skype.com).  Now voice over internet internet protocols (VOIP) hs been around for quite some time but it has never been this cool.  Skype is free to download and use, and if the person you want to talk to is also using skype then it is completely free.  If you want to call just about any phone number in the world you have ot sign up for what is called SkypeOut, which is pretty simple.  You buy SkypeOut credits and when you make calls the per-minute rate is subtracted from your credit total. You can keep track of your total either on the skype interface or at the website.  The company appears to be in Europe so the default monetary amount is in Euros, but you can change that setting pretty easily.  So far today I used about an hour of time, calling Boston, various cell-phones and my mom and it cost me about 65 cents or so.  They also have a premium service called SkypeIn that lets you pay a charge starting in 3 month intervals to have a phone number that people outside of Skype can use to call into you, it even comes with a voicemail feature.  The program will run on PC, MAC, LINUX and even the pocket PC platform (if you are running Windows CE).