This week's topic dealt with "Communication & Networks", which was especially interesting to me as I am a regular and convinced user of Skype. I am traveling a lot and during my 6 months stay in Australia it was unbelievable how complicated and expensive it was to call my family and friends back home. However, as soon as I returned to Germany (what a great timing...), I heard about this "Voice over IP" technology utilized by this program called "Skype". I downloaded Skype, started to use it, and I cannot imagine living without it anymore, to be honest. I used it during my studies in the Netherlands to stay in touch with my family and friends at home, to call my cousin, who lives in HongKong, and of course I frequently use it from the US to talk with my friends and relatives. And I can do this for free, if the persons I want to call have Skype and are online. If they also have a camera and a microphone, which are features of nearly every new computer or laptop, I can even see them when I call, because Skype also supports videoconferencing, which is really great. Additionally, I can also call landlines or mobile phones for very low costs using Skype, too. Another feature of Skype is, that I could request a Skype number, which is basically a regular landline number which friends etc. could call from their regular phones and then they would be connected to my computer or a mobile device, that is online at Skype. This is called "SkypeIn". All in all, Skype is a really great program, and as my grandma recently told me, it is way clearer than many other landline-phones and mobile devices.
As one can see, I know how to handle this program as I use it daily, and I am hence aware of the multiple advantages it provides. However, I researched a bit further because I was interested to find out, who actually invented Skype. As I found out, in 2003, it was developed in Europe, specifically in Luxembourg, by two Scandinavians: Niklas Zennström (Swedish) and Janus Friis (Danish). The name for the software program is derived from "Sky peer-to-peer", which was then abbreviated to "Skyper", but since no domain name with "Skyper" was available anymore, they dropped the last "r" and left was the name "Skype".
What was also interesting for me to know is how it is possible that this program can charge these really low prices (i.e. I call a regular landline in Germany for 1.7 Euro Cents). This happens, because the operators of Skype incur very low costs by operating on a peer-to-peer model instead of a usual client server model, which means that there is no centralized server but instead the user directories are stored on each user's computer.
All the features and benefits I listed above, make Skype a very important program for today's business world. I even had my final interview for my internship this summer over Skype and it would have not only been way more complicated to have this interview with only a regular landline, but also it would have been way more expensive. Thus, especially in this international business environment of the present, Skype provides significant cost saving opportunities and in my opinion it could also enhance understanding when communicating with business partners, as they can actually see you when talking, you can show them products or graphs or other things that may be important to your sale and so on.
Sources: http://about.skype.com/
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