Best factoid of the week comes from the Gizmo Cafe Blog, from Canadian consumer tech publisher Geosign.

"Where did the name Skype actually come from?" asks the thoughtful writer. "Is it really a Chuvash word that means 'talking for free'?" The truth, he reveals, is that when Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis founded Skype, they were going to call it Sky Peer-to-Peer, shortened to Skyper. The R was only dropped because the domain name 'Skyper' was already taken. So now you know!

P.S: By the time you read this, I will be sleeping off my jetlag in a Las Vegas hotel room. I'm out there all next week for the annual techie mondo-shindig known as CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Skype and hundreds of Skypalikes will be in attendance, so I shouldn't be short of stuff to report. See you in Vegas, baby.