And the new President is ...

Today, finally: EBay names Silverman chief executive of Skype.

And he presents himself on the Skype Blog: A few words from Skype's incoming CEO. Here some bits of his phrases:

• On March 24, I’ll step aboard
• one of the most rapidly-adopted technologies in human history
• With my wife and kids about to begin their adventure in Estonia
• I don’t yet have the right to expect your enthusiastic two thumbs up. But as we go further on this journey together, I plan to earn it.

And my comments on his blogpost:

• March 24? This means this is a well planned move
• Let Skype be modest: it isn’t a new technology (P2P existed, and phoning through the computer was already possible before with MSN for instance), therefore i restate: Skype is one of the most rapidly adopted software in recent history, and it will probably NOT enter human history like the boomerang or the steam machine!
• Aha, he moves with his family to Estonia … therefore headquarter stays in Europe!
• I like the last phrase: it seems he is modest, but he is ambitious, and has plans (or will still make them) for the long term.

Two more feelings i have:

• Probably Skype will not be sold in the near future (i am quite surprised, i thought it would).
• It is good to see a CEO make comments on the company blog, and apparently he plans to continue to do this: therefore, thumbs up!

Skype isn't my ship, i am not the captain, not even the crew, i am only a fairly happy passenger, but anyway ... welcome on board Josh!

Real Users

100 Billion Skype to Skype minutes, 276 million users: Marketing and Public Relation people like to throw with huge numbers, and Journalists love to pick them up.

Skype updated recently the metrics for the first number, and of course the result was raising the number (or was it cheating?). As Skype is Peer to Peer, they only can make guesses about the minutes served!

And, concerning the second number, they always omit to say it means "registered user accounts" (including unused and multiple accounts).

But, what about the real(-istic) numbers? Let us play around with the only number provided by the Skype Client, everybody can do the same, and perhaps publish in the comments here his own number.I have 187 Skype usernames in my contact list. Some of my friends have multiple user accounts, others are virtual friends (like “echo123”), others are not active Skypers anymore. Discounting these, i have 132 active contacts remaining. From these, 36 were online on Saturday, February 23 at 12:00 PM GMT+1. This is 27% of my contacts. At the same time there were 8.6 million people online according to my Skype client. Therefore [and here I make a non-scientifical guess], this number represents also 27% of all active Skype users. Extrapolating, there are about 31.5 million active Skype Users. Of course, my sample is quite small, therefore not statistically relevant. But, anyway, quite close to the “other guess” of Hudson Barton, who calculates 30,339,264 million users.

Thanks

[This post was edited]
Two known blogs on Skype picked up my previous post or the information in my blog and made some own changes or interpretations.

See Russel Shaw here: Skype call trend lines are changing: here’s what this means

And Skype Journal here: 12 Million Online - New Peak on 18 February 2008
Correction on one of these posts we did reach 12 million on Monday 18 February, not on Sunday 18 February.

And, thanks for the compliments Russel :-)

12 million in record time!

Yesterday Skype reached around 19h GMT 12 million concurrent users online, this for the first time ever. It went from 11 to 12 million in 42 days.This is an absolute speed record. The previous record million “speed” was 63 days in March 2006.

It is worth to notice that in the past the peaks were somewhere between 16h and 17h GMT. Now it occurs about two hours later. This shows a recent growth in the Americas. Or, in other words, they are catching up with the usage rate of the Europeans.

And when will Asia catch up? When it does, we should see lesser fluctuations of the number of concurrent users online between day and night, or at least a change in the patterns of the curve. If you want to see these daily fluctuations, make a jump at the very nice graphs of http://nyanyan.to.

Where is the new CEO?

It has been almost 5 months since Niklas Zennström stepped down as Skype CEO and was replaced “ad interim” by Michael van Swaaij.In the meantime, there were some rumours, and some facts:

• Google sniffing round Skype
• Whitman resigns as eBay CEO
• IMHO, no innovations anymore at Skype, no strategy changes, and still too many bugs and customer complaints
• eBay is about to sell Skype to Hutchison Whampoa

So, when will know where the ship is going? Remember only this …
eBay agreed that if, on or prior to March 31, 2008, eBay sells or transfers securities representing greater than 50% of the outstanding voting power of, or economic interest in, Skype (it) would pay up to an additional €138,411,300 … to the Earn Out Sellers.

Therefore, no official news before April 1st i guess. And i hope this will not be an April 1st joke!