No fixed line anymore

I just received an e-mail from my brother Paul, and i translate from Dutch:

Hello everybody,
Just to let you know that from June 1 on you will not be able to join me anymore on my fixed line 09/259 ** ** because I cancelled it.
You can still reach me on my cellular phone 04** ****** or on my Skype account ‘p**********e’

OK, good, this certainly is a cost saving decision, and he didn’t use his line for professional purpose anyway! And probably some of his friends will wonder what Skype is (if they awake out of the stone ages) or will think: "well that Skype stuff seems to work!". Viral marketing? Yes!

Skype Contribution to eBay

eBay published their SEC filings, or in other words additional information on the First Quarter results. The most important additional information is the “Contribution”, defined as: “Direct contribution consists of net revenues from external customers less direct costs”

Here the evolution graph:
Interesting to see that after a dip in the last quarter of 2008 the contribution seems to rise again to 36 million US$ or 28 million €. In Euro, this is the highest number ever achieved. This seems promising, and as 80% of the revenue is outside the USA, in my opinion the Euro number is more relevant than the US$ number.

The contribution per “user name” - I emphasize “user NAME” – is stabilizing around 8 dollar cent per quarter, but this number is useless. Better would be if Skype provided the number of active usernames. If we estimate that there are about 45 million active users, the contribution per active user is however 81 cent per quarter! And if we estimate that only 20% are paying customers, each customer is spending about 4 US$ per quarter.