Bangalore: Skype has shrunk the world in profound ways that few could have foreseen in 2003. It diluted the miles that separated people from their families, friends and business acquaintances with voice and video calls and instant messaging over the Internet.

The service, which was launched in late August 2003 by two Scandinavian technology entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennstroem of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark is celebrating 10 years of shrinking the world with easy ways of communication.

Through Skype the phone calls may be placed to recipients on the traditional telephone networks. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged via a debit-based user account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features, including file transfer, and videoconferencing. Unlike most other VoIP services, Skype is a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software, and this is reflected in Skype's original proposed name of Sky Peer-to-Peer.

At present a total of 300 million users make two billion minutes of online video calls a day, according to AFP. The brand name has been turned into a verb - a rare distinction shared by the likes Twitter, Google and Xerox.

On 10 May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications for US$8.5 billion. The company was incorporated as a division of Microsoft, and Microsoft acquired all of the company's technologies with the purchase. This was completed on 13 October 2011.

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