“Skype” was the brainchild of Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friisk, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallin. The product made its first appearance in the year 2003.
As far as its name is concerned, Skype was derived from the words "sky" and "peer". On average, Skype had more than 663 million registered users by the end of the year 2010, a while before it was purchased by Microsoft in $8.5 billion in the year 2011. Originally it was called “Skyper” however, its name was later shortened to Skype. When it was discovered the final product Skyper wasn’t available at all the Internet Domains.
In a short span of time the product became widely popular as it allowed all of its users to communicate through video using a webcam or by voice chat using a microphone. However, the calling can also be performed to other Skype users for free and at some additional charges as well if the call is made on a landline or cellphone connection.
The idea of the introduction of Skype was to reach more people, and this could only be attained by providing a more reliable connection for each of its users. In addition to this, the facility was completely free. That helped a lot to fetch maximum users. Skype’s biggest selling point was that users could make free voice calls to each other from any part of the world.
Skype uses the functionality of converting the voice signals into data, then send it over to the Internet from the host device, and then again restores the audio signals at the receiver’s node. Likewise the standard telephones, Skype provides a convenient feature of voicemail and call forwarding as well. However, in contrast to the standard telephones, Skype could add video facility in it and that’s the main point from where the fun really begins.
