Skype announced Thursday it bought Qik, a mobile live-video streaming...
Skype announced Thursday it bought Qik, a mobile live-video streaming company. The price was not disclosed. Skype also announced the launch of a new business version of Skype for Windows, which allows group video calling. Skype’s new CEO, Richard Bates,…
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said at CES that “video is the next frontier” for Skype “and we've crossed that tipping point in terms of the way that people want to use video.” Forty percent of Skype’s traffic is video call usage, Bates said. Skype launched its two-way iPhone app on New Year’s Eve, he noted. In the first 24 hours, the company logged 4 million downloads and 1 million video calls. “We believe that video and mobile is going to be one of the places that people want to go next,” he said. Bates said he has been encouraged by the way people view Skype since he joined the company in October from Cisco. “It’s increasingly becoming more and more useful,” he said. “It’s becoming something that is used not just from a consumer context but more and more from a business context.” Bates also apologized for a service failure of several hours last month. “We learned a lot,” he said. “We got to root cause very quickly. Our number one mission was to get the service up and running for Christmas.” The company also posted “a very detailed post-mortem,” he said.