Great summary from Jeff Clavier concerning two interviews (Endgadget and silicon.com) of Niklas Zennström, CEO of Skype.

New feature – SkypeIn

Amongst other things (voicemail, video-conference, etc.), Zennström mentions that Skype is going to roll-out a SkypeIn capability (at some point during the winter) allowing regular telephone users to reach a Skype user. This supposedly means that Skype users will be assigned a telephone number, and that Skype will become a full blown VOIP service.

Some little issues

[…]I have noticed recently that the quality of international calls tended to degrade compared to a few months ago (“ransom of success”).
More problematic seems to be the chronic issue that Skype is having with SkypeOut and its credit card processing function.

I have also heard a lot of complaints about their their online support: always very nice and polite, but of very limited usefulness (which is kinda problematic).

Nice conclusion from Jeff

Unlike so many other startups, their problem is that they can’t take the money people want to pay for their service ;-)

Now some facts & figures

• Skype was founded on August 29, 2003
• 70 employees (locations: London, Estonia, Luxembourg)
• 13 million users worldwide in 200 countries (!)
• 80’000 new users daily (!)
• 500’000 simultaneous users connected, peak > 1 million simultaneous users
• average call time: 6 minutes
• 295’000 SkypeOut customers
• 2.4 billion minutes with SkypeOut (Vonage has 170’000 customers, passed the biliion minutes served in 2004)
• VC financing of Skype: $19M

We are using Sype professionally very intensively since months with a lot of good experience. For example: last week, some of us had to coordinate a very complexe “move-to-production” process (2 guys in France, 1 in Switzerland) during about 5 hours. Thanks to the exclusive usage of Skype for the telephone conversations, I saved about 650 euros in one time (cell phones costs, including the roaming costs). GREAT :-)