Zitat des Tages von Niklas Zennstrom:
People need to access Skype wirelessly, no matter where they are, and what happens is that we'll be taking advantage of the rollout of Internet everywhere - WiFi and WiMax in particular.
Some Internet operators are concerned that video services such as Netflix and YouTube consume lots of the bandwidth on the network. While there is some truth to this, my guess is that the operators wished they could provide the same kind of services with the same success as Netflix and YouTube.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm - last thing at night you'll send emails, first thing in the morning you'll read emails, and you'll wake up in the middle of the night. But it's hugely rewarding as you're fulfilling something for yourself.
You have 1 billion people using the Internet with 200 million of those now using broadband internet connections, so the Internet has become a powerful network. It can carry calls.
In fact, we just surpassed our first 1 million simultaneous users online.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.
They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing.
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
We have just started, and if you compare the number of people using Skype to the number using a telephone network around the world, we're still just starting.
What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines.
I try not to dwell on big mistakes but to move on when I make a mistake. I make mistakes most of the times and that's part of the risk profile being an entrepreneur. I guess one big mistake I did was not to start my own company earlier. I spent nine years working for others before starting Kazaa in 2000.
I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.
If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries.
With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way.
It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don't pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.
It's extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn't a sustainable business.
You shouldn't be afraid of failure - when something fails, you think, 'What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.' Then kill that project and move on to the next. Don't get disappointed.
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.
Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
Video is moving online in a big way. It's proven to be a challenging market for some companies that start out as a pure Internet company such as Joost.
Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.
Surround yourself with smart, dedicated people - to build something isn't a one-man show. It's more important to have smart people who really believe in what you're doing than really experienced people who may not share your dream.
Talent can pop up anywhere in the world, it's not just one city block.
