Many of us have heard of Skype, a fantastic way to talk to friends, family and business partners through your computer for free. Each day, over 150,000 people are downloading this excellent program. Skype currently has more than 50 million registered users, and was bought by online auction giant eBay for US$4.1 billion last month.

Skype dominates the free VoIP industry, with many more users using the internet phone than AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! IM, MSN Messenger and the like. The line quality using Skype is surprisingly good, even though it goes through your computer. The downfall of Skype is that you must have your computer on and connected to the internet in order to receive calls, and you must be at your computer to talk. On Skype’s website, you can find a short informal movie that tells you how it works.

The great thing about Skype is that, for additional fees, you can make and receive normal calls. You can call overseas for the price of a local call using SkypeOut. Another premium feature of the program is SkypeIn, which does the opposite. You are given a real phone number and can receive phone calls from any standard telephone in the world. For those more interested in Skype, you can buy a telephone that connects to your computer. In the future, registered eBay users will be able to talk to each other using Skype, which no doubt will make transactions faster and less complicated.

Skype is a free program, and you can make free calls to other Skype users provided they are online. For extra charges, you can subscribe to a voice mail package that is just like an answering machine. Skype has many great features, including conference calls and text chatting. It is always being upgraded; new features are constantly poping up!

Skype can be installed onto any operating system. It’s free to use for calls between two computers. To get it, click the picture below to go to the download page. If you know us, please drop us a line and then we can start talking! Go to [1] skype.com to get started.