Information Research Weblog

Found a long article today in Fortune - not available at its Web site, unless you are a subscriber, unfortunately - but you can read the first page there - about a start-up Internet telephony company called Skype. These are the guys who brought you KaZaa, so peer-to-peer communication is their game and what is telephony other than P2P? However, unlike KaZaa, which was funded out of their savings, Skype has attracted the attention of the venture capitalists who believe that their software for Voice Over Internet Protocol (otherwise known as VOIP) is a winner - to the extent of investing $25 million in the first round, with the second round of funding over-subscribed.

This is serious enough for the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to be saying that telecom as we know it is finished:

I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype. When the inventors of KaZaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic... - it's over. The world will change now inevitably.

The key is that phrase, 'the quality is fantastic' - VOIP has been around for some time now, but it's been a hassle and the time delays were dreadful and the quality was poor - with broadband use growing and the quality problem apparently solved... well, I'm now among the more than 7 million who have downloaded it, and I'm looking forward to getting set up to use it.

Coincidentally, this week's Time magazine has an article called 'Back from the dead', devoted to the resurgance of interest in, among other things, VOIP. [Thanks for drawing this one to my attention, Alistair... and thanks, Charles, for the link to the inevitable.] The separate bits of the article are on the Time Europe Web site - and the VOIP bit is here.

It looks as though this could be the next big thing!