VoIP to plain old phone system is available on Skype
Done! Predicted a few months ago, Skype launched last week their SkypeOut service allowing you to call from your PC or PDA (running windows or linux), to a normal phone number in many countries for a ridiculously cheap price.
The price list to all available countries is available. (from the Jeff Pulver blog - a great ressource on VoIP).
By the way, Skype folks really need to work on a mailing list for breaking news like this, instead of us checking upon their web site all the time. 15m downloads already ... Not bad for a marketing blitz!
and, version Skype 0.98 (0.98.0.42) was released yesterday.
Finally, Fast Company has blogged about recent comments from Skype's CEO at Supernova 2004. Extracts:
"What I want to talk about is when telephony becomes software, which is what's really happening right now. We're going to see a transition. What does that mean? One key factor is that when telephony becomes a software application, it will live on the edges of a network. There will be no centralized control. Telephony development cycles are still very long. But their carriers' services are very much commodities, and there isn't much differentiation.
When we can change telephony to an application, we'll be able to change the economics of it. That will increase software innovation, new products, services, features. And that will be in the hand of small, nimble, software development companies. There will be higher competition, and the services will live on the Internet."
