This article is about skype story. Apart from its popularity, another peculiar and rarely known fact about Skype is its Origin.
Skype is a one of the most popular services for Instant Messaging and VOIP(Voice Over IP) today. There are other popular instant messaging services such as AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, MSN Messenger, Meebo among others but Skype is distinctly known for its exceptional speech quality, video chat feature and ‘cheap calling rates’ across the globe.
Apart from its popularity, another peculiar and rarely known fact about Skype is its Origin. By origin, we mean the origin of the term ‘Skype’ and not the service itself.
Back in late 2002, when Draper Investment Firm had made a seed investment into a new born concept of Free online calling service, the service was actually termed Skyper, a shortened form of “SkyPeer to Peer”. Only for the reason that some of the closely resembled domains were already taken, the Skyper team was forced to think of a different Brand name. After juggling with a couple of Skyper variants, they finally settled for Skype, simply dropping the alphabet ‘r’ from the earlier name Skyper.
As the word ‘Skype’ had no meaning as such, it initially caused a lot of trouble to people in interpreting what it was and its actual purpose. As the service turned more popular and eventually got acquired by eBay, the name Skype turned a household name and any confusions blurred thereafter.