Besides, I have more important things going on now. Tallinn has five children, and he calls Skype his sixth. So why does he no longer care about his creation? On August 29, , Skype went live for the first time. By , according to Telegeography , Skype accounted for a whopping billion minutes of cross-border voice and video calling in a yearโwhich itself was a stunning 44 percent growth over That increase in minutes was "more than twice that achieved by all international carriers in the world, combined.
It also made Jaan Tallinn and other early Skypers rich. But something changed along the way. Skype is no longer the upstart that refused to put signs on its offices, that dodged international lawyers, and that kept a kiddie pool in the boardroom.
This is the real story of how a global brand truly began, told in more detail than ever before by those who launched it. In , as dot-com fever swept America, an entertainment and news portal called Everyday. The Swedish owner of Tele2, Jan Stenbeck, was determined to launch the Everyday portal and launch it quickly.
They had been into Fidonet, a computer network which preceded the Internet, since the Soviet era. They started a small company, Bluemoon, which made computer games such as Kosmonaut.
In , Kosmonaut became the first Estonian game to be sold abroad. But by the turn of the century, the three friends were down to their last penny and Bluemoon was facing bankruptcy. Short of money, they applied for and got the Tele2 job. The PHP programming language needed for the work was new to them, but the team learned it in a weekend and completed their test assignment much faster than Tele2 requested.
