Making Overseas Call Then

In early 2000, my son was accepted to study at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the US. Being my wife’s boy, she wanted to talk to him regularly on the phone. We would call the local telephone operator and she got him connected to us. Then the magic word, do you accept reverse call? My wife’s conversation was short as it was expensive to have long distance call conversation. Telephone companies were making huge profits from long-distance calls.

Later, with the internet, making long distance call was a bit less expensive. However, we needed to go to a telecommunication shop called “wartel” to use internet telephony to make long-distance calls. The “wartel” was always full with Indonesians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and locals who would talk to their friends for hours for a fixed hourly charge. Gradually, the “wartel” closed down for lack of business due to the introduction of Skype. People could make long distance call on their computers and notebooks for free.

My wife was one of the happiest mothers as she could talk regularly and freely with our daughter, who was studying at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Thank You Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis for Skype  

 

Swedish Niklas Zenntrom and co-founder Dane Janus Friis are now billionaires who sold Skype to eBay Inc. for US$2.6 billion in 2005. Skype is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices and others via the internet. Skype implements a freemium business model. Much of the service is free. Now Skype, part of Microsoft Corporation, has millions of users. Skype was first released in August 2003.

Quotes by Niklas Zennstrom:

“The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century

If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently.”

In an interview with The Times of London on September 30^th, 2018, Niklas Zennstrom outlined his current activities. Skype was considered as one of the most successful technology businesses that emerged from Europe. Since starting Skype in 2003, Niklas Zennstrom has been in a mission to prove world –beating technologies can be started in Europe.

In 2017, his venture fund, Atomico (atomico.com), raised a US$765 million technology fund. The technology fund’s successful investments include Rovio, the creator of the Angry Birds games franchise from Finland, Clash of Clans Supercell and The Climate Corporation.

We hope Niklas Zennstrom will invest in new technologies that would have similar benefits and simplify the lives of parents like Skype did for us.