Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
Result for: interview
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said today that the service will likely not hit the U.S. this year, despite promises since 2009.
While still hopeful, Elk says the company now cannot “commit to a specific date.”
When it does launch, however, it will cost $10 per month, much cheaper than the 10 euros it costs currently in EU nations.
During the interview, Elk also denied having knowledge of Apple knowingly painting Spotify in an ugly light to the Big 4 record labels in an effort to keep their monopoly on the digital music business.
“I don’t actually try to focus on what Apple is doing, or what others are doing,” he added. “I am, first and foremost, a user.”
Whether or not Apple has had any say in the decision, the American labels have made it clear they are not close to signing any Spotify deal for the U.S., even though similar deals are already in place in Europe.
Result for: interview
According to @AndroidDev, the Twitter account for the team that is working on mobile operating system Android, the Android Market has officially hit 100,000 apps.
Number of apps in the Market have increased 300 percent over the last year, hitting new milestones at an increasingly fast pace.
Reads the status, simply: “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market.”
During a recent interview, vice president for engineering at Google Andy Rubin said there are now 270,000 developers writing software for the operating system.
Including apps that have been pulled by their developers over the course of Android’s history, Rubin confirms the number is over 100,000, as well.
For comparison’s sake, Apple’s App Store has just hit 300,000 apps available while the BlackBerry store has just over 10,000.
