We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We're getting 80,000 new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
Video is moving online in a big way. It's proven to be a challenging market for some companies that start out as a pure Internet company such as Joost.
Angry Birds is one of the fastest-growing online products I've seen, growing even faster than Skype, and the company has done a brilliant job of extending it across different platforms and merchandise.
When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way.
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.
Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.
Today, over one million people now make their living on eBay, which is astounding.
With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
We have just started, and if you compare the number of people using Skype to the number using a telephone network around the world, we're still just starting.
I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.
The Chinese market is very, very unique.
You have 1 billion people using the Internet with 200 million of those now using broadband internet connections, so the Internet has become a powerful network. It can carry calls.
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