It’s fair to say Skype is screwing the traditional telephone carriers. New figures suggest that while the recession has slowed the growth of international telephone traffic overall, Skype is blooming as more people discover how to call distant family and remote shagpieces over the internet for free.

Over the past 25 years, international call volume has typically grown at annual rate of 15 per cent. In the past two years, however, international telephone traffic annual growth has slowed to only eight per cent, growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes in 2009. Meanwhile Skype-to-Skype calls grew 51 per cent in 2008 and 63 per cent in 2009, to an estimated 54 billion minutes.

It means Skype is now accountable for 12 per cent of the entire international call volume, a 50 per cent increase on the previous year – calls that once would have generated billions in revenue for carriers are now making them sod-all. Newspapers, magazines, pornography, telecommunications – is there no industry the internet can’t single-handedly destroy?

[Telegeography] via [TechCrunch]

The telecoms game-changer Skype has finally been sold by eBay after months of idle speculation and worthless gossip. This news may very well be speculation and gossip itself, but since the chief rumour-monger is The New York Times, it’s more than likely to be true.

A new venture capital firm headed by the Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen is thought to be one of several investors buying Skype from eBay, who paid a colossal $2.6 billion for the operation back in 2005. The new owners will probably pay far less; analysts at the time of the original deal said eBay had paid over the odds, and reports earlier in the year suggested eBay were willing to accept almost a billion dollars less.

The only fly in the ointment is an outstanding licensing dispute with Joltid, who wrote the code at the heart of Skype’s peer-to-peer communications. Unless that situation is resolved, then any new owners could quickly find themselves with an unworkable product and over 440 million registered users banging on their door – they’d have to bang at the door one at a time meaning massive queues, or it’d need to be a door the size of Portugal. Either way, that’d be a story in itself.

A £0 a month contract may seem like an oxymoron, but that’s not stopping our favourite mobile service provider 3 giving it a go. 3 SIM Zero will be the UK’s first £0 a month contract, with a minimum contract of just one month.

So what do you get for this headline-busting deal? Nothing, in a word. There’s no free handset to choose from, no inclusive minutes, no free texts and no data bolted on the side. Instead what you get is unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls, free instant messaging and free voicemail. The deal is available from 3 on Wednesday.

Of course, the cynic in us would suggest that 3 are being far from altruistic with their offer. While it might be worth the hassle of taking this deal for a second phone – assuming you’ve both a spare handset and the majority of your contacts available on Skype – it’s clearly not a deal for every day use. That’s where 3 will rake in the money – normal mobile calls cost 20p a minute and texts cost 10p each. And because you’ll need a 3G handset, you’re going to be more than tempted to use data services, which will cost 30 pence per MB.

Plenty of people will be lured in by the zero monthly fee, but it’s in no way a replacement for a standard contract with inclusive minutes, texts and data. This is a deal that’ll only be useful to a tiny minority of customers, but you can bet it won’t be marketed in that way.

It was no surprise that the Skype iPhone application, released last week, was downloaded a million times in less than two days. It was also no surprise that service providers would get rather snotty about a piece of software that cuts out the need for their call plans and instead makes good use of the data package.

What is perhaps slightly surprising is the speed with which action has been taken. Within days of Skype’s app appearing in the App Store, regulatory authorities in the US and Europe were asked to investigate, with service providers demanding the application only be allowed to make VoIP calls by wifi rather than over a 3G connection.

T-Mobile Deutschland has now gone further and banned iPhone users in Germany from using the app, stating that its usage could cause potential network problems due to high traffic. A spokesperson then stated that a customer’s contract prohibits modification of the phone’s applications and that the Skype app violates that contract. Furthermore, the Germans are threatening to cancel the contracts of users who use the service on their handset – obviously it’s easier to threaten individuals than have a word with cash cow Apple, who legitimised the app by clearing it for download in the first place.

According to other media reports, the ban on Skype may be the tip of the iceberg; eCanadaNow reports that new EU legislation due to be voted on later this month could legitimise such bans and allow service providers to selectively allow and decline applications without providing any rationale or allowing users to voice opposition. Such a ruling would make a mockery of the App Store in European countries, not only for the end users but for developers, who could spend thousands developing apps that satisfy Apple guidelines but still see them banned.

Bloody Germans, causing trouble. Who won the war anyway? Geoff Hurst. Etc etc.

When I was a professional Star Trek: The Next Generation geek, I probably would have wet myself over one of these. Of course Skype hadn’t been invented 15 years ago, so perhaps I wouldn’t have. Anyway, if it had been, I’d have chewed your arm off at the ulnar collateral ligament to get me hands on one:

It’s your classic ST communicator; plug it into your USB port and off you go, calling alien beings to discuss matters of intergalactic peace and Heisenberg compensators, stuff like that. You know. It’s got mute and volume controls, a speakerphone option and plenty of ST sound effects too. A highly logical choice for VoIP communication, to cram in just one more cliched reference.

What’s that you’re saying? How’s the ST addiction now? All cleared up, thanks. I can’t watch that bullshit-baffles-brains a moment longer, even if Patrick Stewart is one of the finest actors to grace this Earth. Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand…

[EverythingUSB] via [SlipperyBrick]

3’s new all-singing, all-dancing, all-social-meeja-networking, all cancer-curing mobile saviour of humanity was launched yesterday. Except it wasn’t. Because anybody visiting the 3 website which had previously promised a launch date of yesterday, will instead see this:

So it launched yesterday, but it’s coming soon. Either it’s an ingenious marketing campaign involving time travel, or something has gone a little kaka (bonus BW points for anybody spotting the contextual reference there).

What you will find is some of the spec on the new iNQ1 (‘those in the know know it’s pronounced “ink one”‘ – no, we weren’t either) which we heard about for the first time last week, and actually some of the more exciting features are nothing to do with Facebook.

The handset lets you receive Facebook alerts direct to your mobile and send status updates to your contacts; this is a genuine integration of the Facebook application, then – contacts will appear in the directory along with their status updates.

What’s more exciting is the promise of a contacts list constantly updated with which platforms each of your contacts is available on – Skype, Facebook or Windows Messenger. Plus the handset can be used as a ‘plug & play’ modem with your laptop; we’re presuming the bandwidth charges will be included in any pre-paid bundles, otherwise they wouldn’t be shouting about the fact.

The INQ1 also has a iTunes/iPhone carousel to flick through websites and apps, plus the now-familiar auto-landscape feature which flips the view depending on the handset’s orientation.

All in all, a reasonably fun proposition, a little late for the party, whenever it’s actually available to buy. Let’s hope that the handsets don’t over-promise but under-deliver because of buggy hardware. Nokia N Series, anyone?

I’d thought whispers of a new dot-com bubble had been, up until very recently, nothing more than doom-mongering of the highest order. Two important changes have occurred since 2000, when web companies last became unstuck. For starters, new media and start-ups have learned how to be lean and how to deliver. More importantly, the web is now very capable of generating millions in revenue – something that wasn’t necessarily the case eight years ago.

For my money, there are a couple of areas where companies has still failed to learn from past mistakes. The web needs revenue models beyond display advertising – you can’t build the foundations of a business plan solely on a third party like Google Ads. And the ethos of many companies is still to put growth ahead of profits; build a user-base regardless of whether it can (ever) generate money. That kind of thinking is fine to a point, so long as the sector isn’t sucked into a swirling vortex of disaster, such as global economic ruin. Ah.

And so talk of popular sites soon becoming unstuck is all the rage again. Take a look at this article by Rafe Needleman at cnet, listing 11 web businesses that could be about to hit the skids. He argues that popularity will count for squat if the lads with hammers come knocking. Could we really be about to see the demise of Twitter, Skype and MySpace? And which companies do you think are failing to deliver? Which would you like to see succeed and which deserve to be taken round the back and shot?