Voipally

Voipwiki breaks the Skype numbers out of the recent EBay quarterly report. They show that Skype growth slowed over the past quarter (26% vs 42% for the previous quarter) but grew the number of registered users from 95 million to 113 million, while increasing revenue per user to $1.56 per user per year.

It’s somewhat surprising to me that growth slowed since you would think that EBay could push Skype to its huge user base fairly easily. Perhaps that is waiting on some kind of EBay-Skype integration.

Techcruch reports on Comscore’s Instant Messenger marketshare report, focusing on the low number reported for GTalk. However, they appear to be reporting on the usage of the GChat client application only, which would mean that actual GTalk (via GMail) usage would be significantly higher. Google appears to be trying to disrupt the IM market by offering a web-based chat client, and allowing interperation via the Jabber protocol. This (disrupting an established market by trying to change the parameters of that market) is a pretty obvious strategy.
Ignoring the gratuitous (and probably mis-founded) Google bashing, the other interesting thing to come from that report is the significant lead that MSN Messenger has over its rivals.

Gizmo now allows free calls to landlines in over 60 countries and free calls to mobiles nearly 20 countries. The list of countries where calls to mobiles are allowed includes the US, Canada and the UK, but also countries such as San Marino and Vatican City. The list of landlines enabled countries is more extensive, though, and includes the US, the UK, much of Europe and Australia.