Skype: Over 32 Million Served

Since it's initial release in August of 2003, Skype has been a game changer in how the world communicates.but do you know how many people use it? At least 32 million.

According to an announcement from Skype, the very popular VoIP company passed a new milestone yesterday when it had 32 million people using its service concurrently.

No specific demographics were given, as to how many people were video calling at the same time, or how many were logged in but idle, but nevertheless it’s still a very impressive figure.

Assuming the world’s population is approximately seven billion people, that’s 0.45% of the entire world on Skype at the same time.

Skype, a hybrid peer-to peer and server-client voice over IP address (VoIP) computer application, was created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (of Kazaa file-sharing fame) in Estonia, in August of 2003.

Zennstrom and Friis held the belief that 'phone calls should be free', which would become the company's mantra. Even after selling Skype to eBay in November of 2009, and subsequently being acquired by Microsoft in 2011, both Zennstrom and Friis remain on the board of directors, and have some say in the direction of the company.

Before Microsoft purchased Skype, there were several rumors that none other than Zennstrom and Friis were exploring purchasing the hot web real estate back from eBay, who had planned to integrate the VoIP service into it's online auction site, but never really did anything other than spin its wheels for almost 2 years, after learning that eBay clients preferred email communication with people they did not know over direct communication.

I firmly believe that Skype, under Microsoft ownership -- with it's unlimited resources -- will continue to gain dominance in the voice over IP arena, and that in the future we will see Skype installed, by default, on all computing devices, in the same way that a clock and a contacts list are, and that Zennstrom and Friis will soon realize their original dream of free phone calls for everybody!