More news from PCHome and Taiwan. Skype and PCHome recently did a campus tour in various Taiwan universities. I had a word with the tour organizers and also learned a bit what the universities and students are like there.

How many students signed up for a Skype Name during the tour so far?

We don’t have an accurate number of this, as you can count it in different ways. For example, some people tried Skype a long time ago, but did not use it for more than a year. They claimed that they would come back to use it again as soon as they learned about SkypeOut, SMS or other new features. Others had been on Skype for a while, but did not know you can use Skype to call traditional phones. We are quite sure most of them will try SkypeOut as we could give them a Skype Credit voucher to try out.

If you are asking "how many 100% new Skype users came from the Campus tour", I would say that several hundred sounds reasonable number.

Which universities did you go to?

More than ten. Some were too far to visit this time, but we will prepare and send the materials to them.

There are more and more foreign students in Taiwan recently. At Chiao Tung University, they have more than a thousand foreign students this year. At Tsing Hua University, there are students from at least 20 different countries who had tried SkypeOut, and almost all of them had positive experiences with it. Some of them do not have have credit cards, so the Family Mart is just a perfect place for them to get Skype Credit.

What goodies did the students get?

We prepared many small gifts such as 30 minutes phone cards, earphones, handsets etc for the campus Skype promotion events. The most popular were the tattoo labels. Many people liked to paste a cute Skype logo on their arms, faces, even buttocks. We used the labels to attract them to our site first, then we introduced the Skype to them and encouraged them to call a phone to try the quality in real use right away. This tactic worked well.

Any comments from students? Do they like Skype?

Do they like it? No... they love it At some schools that had many foreign students, I saw many students from Ukraine , Bolivia, Kenya, Gambia, Russia , Malaysia, India, Pakistan ,Vietnam, Honduras ,mainland China, Indonesia, Czech Republic etc, calling home with pleasant amazement. Some of them had not even contacted their families once after they arrived Taiwan because of the expensive telephone fees. When you saw the tears in their eyes when they heard the voices from their parents, their facial expressions told you how they felt with Skype. After the trials, almost everyone grabbed my hands, and asked me: "How? How can I get the Skype Credit? Where is Family Mart?" You really should have been there to see it.

As a whole, the Campus Tour was successful. I believe that many students will start to use Skype due to the direct face to face introductions and trials.