Happy new and creative year 2007 to all our software partners

Paul has asked me to drop you all a note (cf. december newsletter) – not just to wish you all "Merry Christmas" but also to tell you a bit more about what’s in store for Skype next year.

But before I do, I wanted to say that for so long, we’ve been really keen to bring our developer community closer to Skype. Why? Well, we see you as key partners for us to take Skype further on its journey of becoming the world’s greatest internet communications offering. And we mean it!

With Skype 3.0 for Windows, we’ve launched our Skype Extras Manager to give you a great distribution platform for all of the applications you’re developing. Of course, we only want the best and most innovative Extras to be featured – this is software after all! We’re looking to you to develop even more services for our consumer and business users to use when skyping. But I’ll come back to this in a moment.

It’s amazing to think that Skype only came into being a little over three years ago. When Janus and I started Skype, we knew where we wanted the company to go. We set ourselves a bold ambition but we had no doubt we’d achieve it. We knew we’d be taking on some pretty stiff competition. But we believed that giving people a product that was easy to use -- in a market where other alternatives to communicating were expensive and cumbersome -- would give us a real edge. And it did.

We have never doubted our potential for growth. Making Skype simple and easy to use -- so that even your grandmother can understand it -- is why Skype has been so successful. The numbers prove it. A year ago, we had 54 million registered users. Today, there are over 136 million worldwide. We talk to our users all the time. Over half are telling us that they love Skype because it lets them meet new people. Skype is not just a product, it’s a community. And communities thrive when they bring people together.

Skype’s growing popularity gives us great opportunity to sell premium services. And this is where you come in. Some of you, for example Unyte, are already seeing the financial rewards from your hard work. Since the beta launch of Skype 3.0, Unyte has seen a four fold increase in new users. This is impressive when you consider how new Skype Extras Manager is.

Your contributions and innovation skills are incredibly important to us. I mean that. Innovation and change will always define Skype. And I really believe that when it comes to innovating, only the fast beat the slow. The quicker we are to market with great new features, the more people will talk about us to their friends and family and the power of viral marketing will take over.

We don’t claim to have all the greatest ideas in the world. We need you to help us with that. And we want to help your products succeed. We need each other. Our vision is to take internet communications well beyond the computer. Talk to us, make Skype an even better internet communications experience and together we’ll continue to change the way the world communicates forever.

Thank you for all your efforts so far,

Niklas