Saturday, February 17, 2024

Skype

 


When Sharon and I and Kelly moved to Arizona in the fall of 2011, Brian stayed in Chicago. In addition to the fact had a well-paying job at a real estate management company, he was also dating a delightful woman named Ejiro, who happened to be a doctor. Roughly a year later, they came to the realization that a long-term relationship was not viable, so Brian decided to take the Amtrak train from Chicago to Flagstaff, and he arrived in the Grand Canyon state in July of 2013.

By the time he arrived, Kelly and Chris had recently moved from Flagstaff to Tucson so that Kelly could more easily get the prerequisite courses she needed for her nursing degree. Brian shortly thereafter moved to Tucson, and lived with Kelly and Chris briefly until he could find his own place.

“Plenty of Fish” paired him with a woman in Tucson where he lived for a brief period of time, but he moved out when she went full crazy. Fortunately, he met Kim not long after that, and that relationship eventually led to a marriage and a couple of very cute children.



Shortly after we moved to Flagstaff, we discovered Skype, which allowed us to have video conferences with Brian in Chicago.

 Skype has existed longer than most of us realize – and it is still in operation today, although it had changed ownership a few times since its founding in 2005.

Skype (/skaɪp/) is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones (over traditional telephone networks), and other features. It is available on various desktop, mobile, and video game console platforms.

Skype was created by Niklas ZennströmJanus Friis, and four Estonian developers, and first released in August 2003. In September 2005, eBay acquired it for $2.6 billion. In September 2009, Silver LakeAndreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, valuing the business at $2.92 billion. In May 2011, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and used it to replace their Windows Live Messenger. As of 2011, most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees were in Tallinn and TartuEstonia.

Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It became entirely powered by Microsoft-operated supernodes in May 2012;[in 2017, it changed from a peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure-based service. As of February 2023, it was used by 36 million people each day.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype 

Skype’s popularity has been hurt by Apple’s I-Phone, which was first released in 2007, Microsoft’s own messaging app and Zoom.

The I-Phone has a FaceTime feature, which permits video conferencing, a feature that the Android phone did not have until recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

FaceTime was added to the I-phone is 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime

Zoom was introduced in April of 2011, and its use exploded during the coronavirus epidemic. Annual revenue is more than $4 billion a year, and its success have made founder Eric Yuan a very rich man, with an estimated net worth of more than $16 billion, a very impressive figure for a man who did not speak English when he moved to California in 1997, but it took 9 tries for him to obtain a visa.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications

Although Skype’s founding nearly 20 years ago seems like ancient history, consider the fate of a company that is even older.

AOL (originally known as America Online) had its origins in 1985, nearly 40 years ago.

AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the 1990s and was (at one point) the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. AOL once provided a dial-up internet service to millions of Americans and pioneered instant messaging and chat rooms with AOL Instant Messanger (AIM). In 1998, AOL purchased Netscape for US$4.2 billion. By 2000, AOL was providing internet service to over 20 million consumers, dominating the market of internet service providers (ISPs). In 2001, at the height of its popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner in the largest merger in U.S. history. AOL rapidly shrank thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up and rise of broadband. AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed the new CEO. Under his leadership, the company invested in media brands and advertising technologies.

On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications for $4.4 billion. On May 3, 2021, Verizon announced it would sell Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. On September 1, 2021, AOL became part of the new Yahoo! Inc.

Do you remember this greeting?

 

(2) AOL Dial Up Internet Connection Sound + You've Got Mail (America Online) 90's - YouTube

 

I have not had an AOL account for many years, but I know a few people who still have theirs. I now rely on Microsoft’s hormail.com and Google’s Gmail for my electronic mail needs.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

For videoconferencing, ZOOM has been a great tool. Not only did it allow me to teach classes remotely in 2020, I also use it to contact with my old neighbor in China on a fairly regular basis, and I have used it to connect to family picnics in Minnesota. It also happens to be how Brian and Kim got married, since the justice of the peace was in downtown Tucson, and they were in a hotel in Oro Valley.

 

Technology is constantly changing, so it’s important to try to stay as current as you can.  

 

 

 

 


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