NY TIMES – Aug 9 – Skype hopes to raise $100M in IPO. Analysts have speculated that Skype’s sale, planned for the Nasdaq market, could be the biggest initial offering in the technology sector since Google went public in 2004 and raised $1.67 billion. Skype has ~124M users a month worldwide. In the first six months of this year, those users made 95 billion minutes worth of calls, the company said. But only 8.1M Skype users are paying customers. Video calling represents 40% of total calling time on Skype, and analysts say this could grow further as the proliferation of smartphones enables more people to place such calls while on the go. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
Mark Brooks: Fascinating. 40% of Skype users use the webcam. So people are becoming more comfortable using their webcams, it would seem. However, growth for the webcam based dating site leaders Speeddate and Woome growth has stagnated in the USA according to Compete. Have you considered adding webcam based dating to your dating site?