Internet telephony provider Skype is thinking bigger than you might have expected, even for an increasingly popular year-old company: they're looking to introduce a video-enabled Internet calling service in 2005.
"We can easily develop new services on top of Skype," said co-founding chief executive Niklas Zennstorm. "One is video, and we are expecting to deliver something next year."
This would follow up the company's April introduction of Skype service for pocket personal computers. The next step, Zennstorm said, would be Skype for different kinds of smart phone units. "We are currently evaluating different smart phone operating systems including Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, and Linux," he said.
If his company has made a mistake in the early going, Zennstorm continued, it was underestimating the fast growth in the market of Internet telephony devices that conform to the Session Initiation Protocol standard which allow automatic routing of Internet calls to accepting handsets. At first, Skype balked at the SIP standard.
"We may have made the wrong decision," Zennstrom said. "We looked at the whole SIP standard and saw problems with it. We developed proprietary technology to solve these problems."
But he also said most Skype users until now weren't interested in Net calls over SIP handsets. "We take great care to listen to our subscribers and, so far, making calls to other SIP-based voice users is very far down their lists," he said.
