A few VOIP tidbits this morning:
Quite a bit of speculation is floating around about Skype being snapped up. The Register lists potential suitors as Yahoo!, Google or News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, while The Independent claims that $3 billion might be Murdoch’s magic number. Meanwhile, Skype says it isn’t for sale. Ultimately, it’s impossible to predict the service’s long-term growth; venture capitalist Tim Draper compares Skype’s purchase to Microsoft’s of Hotmail in 1998 for $450 million – the service now has nearly 200 million users. I suppose Skpe could ultimately go belly-up if people lose all interest in VOIP, but that seems unlikely. The tech big boys wouldn’t be so interested if they believed this to be the case.
Meanwhile, the guys at Engadget posted this morning about VoipBuster, who, appropriately, is busting Skype when it comes to calling rates. According to Skype Journal, the service allows users to make free calls to most of the SkypeOut countries after opening account and paying a single Euro (~$1.27) worth of credit. That’s it! Free calls to most of the world for just over a dollar. VoipBuster shows its limitations, however, in a complete lack of a feature set – no chat, no conference calls, no online presence information, and no PC-to-PC calling. But for PC-to-phone, for now it doesn’t get any cheaper.
pssst: make a Mac version!