NEWS
Internet telephony provider Skype plans to offer bloggers and others the ability to hold audio chats in the next version of its net telephone product.
Speaking at the at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, one of this year's silicon.com Agenda Setters, said the next version of Skype will enable people to post a link on a blog or website that will take people to a public chatroom when clicked on.
The live chats would be "Skypecasts", which Zennström described as public conversations or audio conferences that people can moderate. He would not provide a timeline for the feature except to say it would be "soon".
Meanwhile, Skype has had conversations with many social-networking sites about offering services that would allow users to "share content with each other in a conversation", he said.
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Skype was the hot internet company last year when it was purchased by online auction pioneer eBay in a deal valued at $2.6bn at the time. Now that it is part of publicly traded eBay, Skype has to pay more attention to its finances, said Zennström. "The big difference is now we have to manage according to a quarterly budget," he said. "There are few companies growing as fast as we're growing in revenue."
The biggest challenges Skype faces going forward are to get the service onto mobile and handheld devices and to generate revenue apart from telecom, Zennström said. Telecom revenues for all companies will drop as the sector's business model moves to offering free phone calls, he said.
He predicted that in 10 years most telecommunications revenue will come from broadband services.
Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com
