Skype - A New P2P Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Software..

Why VoIP is music to Kazaa's ear?
An Interview by Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com




Kazaa co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have a new target: the telephone industry.

They've launched Skype, which they claim is the first Internet phone service to use peer-to-peer software. In just its first week of availability, 60,000 people downloaded the free Skype software. Other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage or Free World Dialup (FWD), needed several months to attract the same level of interest.

Just as they shook up the music industry by creating Kazaa, the pair now wants to rattle the cages of traditional telephone companies. In an interview with CNET News.com, Friis discussed the coming challenges for VoIP, what Skype actually means (nothing, as it turns out) and a possible regulatory backlash against VoIP providers, among other issues.

Q: Why are the creators of Kazaa going into VoIP?
A: After Niklas Zennstrom and I did Kazaa, we looked at other areas where we could use our experience and where P2P technology could have a major disruptive impact. The telephony market is characterized both by what we think is rip-off pricing and a reliance on heavily centralized infrastructure. We just couldn't resist the opportunity to help shake this up a bit.

How long did it take to come up with the Skype software?
Skype has been in active development for about six months. It took less time to develop Kazaa--about four months--but we think we've come up with a better piece of software this time.

What's a "Skype"?
Skype does not mean anything. It just sounds good, and the dot-com domain name was available. We hope people will start saying, "I'll Skype you" instead of "I'll call you," which means "I'll call you without paying any rip-off per-minute charges and with superior better-than-phone quality."

Where does Skype fit into the VoIP landscape? Do you want to be a primary phone service like Vonage or Net2Phone?
Skype is addressing all the problems of legacy VoIP solutions: bad sound quality, difficult to set up and configure, and the need for expensive, centralized infrastructure. No one has seriously addressed these problems before, and this is why VoIP has never really taken off.

Kazaa has a renegade image, whether it's deserved or not. Do you think Skype will have that same kind of reputation?
Kazaa's renegade image is due to the copyright stuff that has defined Kazaa, not to mention Hollywood's multimillion-dollar public relations campaign against Kazaa in particular and file sharing in general. All Kazaa users we've met--and in the end they're the only ones that matter--love Kazaa. The hundreds of e-mails we've received from Skype Beta users speak clearly. People love Skype as well.

What kind of impact do you think Skype will have?
We hope Skype will be as popular as Kazaa and will have a similar disruptive impact--albeit on a different industry. Very few people can find anything bad about unmetered telephony--except the established telephone companies.

Are you really the first P2P VoIP system?
P2P is a widely used and abused term. Software is not peer-to-peer just because it establishes direct connections between two users; most Internet software does this to some extent. True P2P software creates a network through which all clients join together dynamically to help each other route traffic and store information. The power of the network grows with the number of users.

You seemed to suffer from a very good problem: In your first few hours of operation, there were too many downloads. What happened?
Skype went from almost zero to 60,000 downloads in just one week. It took more than three months for Kazaa and Free World Dialup to reach those totals. This created a very high load on our download and registration servers. At the same time, we suffered from some outages at our hosting provider. Everything is running smoothly now, although we do expect occasional hiccups during the beta period.

One thing most people say about Skype is the tremendous following it's likely to have, given its pedigree and the 250 million downloads of Kazaa. Will Skype leverage Kazaa's popularity? If so, how do you do that?
The growth since we launched has been purely viral. There's been a lot of media coverage, but this does not seem to have much impact. Before we launched, we thought that Skype would be even more viral than Kazaa. When you've got it, you want your friends to get it as well, so you can talk for free. With Kazaa, you don't really need your friends on it, but people think its cool and recommend it to their friends.

So you are also taking on some real heavyweights--all the major IM makers?
Again, Skype is telephony software, and the instant messaging capabilities are just supportive. People are getting Skype because it's the best telephony software available. That being said, we do think that many people are tired of bloated IM clients from large companies such as Microsoft and would be eager to replace it with something simple that just works.

Do you worry about backlash from traditional phone and cable companies? Couldn't these companies, for instance, invoke the "no multiple connections" clauses in their customers' contracts to thwart your efforts?
When you buy a broadband connection, you expect to be able to use it the way you choose. If an Internet service provider were to start blocking Skype, this would undoubtedly lead to disastrous public relations, a mass exodus of users to more friendly providers and the very real possibility of anticompetitive lawsuits. Besides, Skype only threatens those ISPs that also provide telephony services. Lots of ISPs only provide Internet access, and they will welcome anything that drives up demand for their broadband services.


P/S: Download now, it's totally FREE! Students who stay in colleges will definitely love the conference calls! (Add me, okay? ID:futrah)

What Kind of A Boyfriend / Girlfriend Are You?

Guys: http://www.kidzworld.com/site/cq71-1.asp
Girls: http://www.kidzworld.com/site/cq57-1.asp

**Futra Hurairah**
You're a Cool BF!
You're a lot of fun to hang out with and all the ladies can see that.
You've got your priorities straight and can juggle both the GF and the buds.
Stick to the smooth moves and you'll continue to be a guy that's in high demand.

How Not To Make Money On The Internet..

Over the past few years, I've tried just about everything to make money on the internet. One thing I can tell you without hesitation - virtually all, if not all, of the "money making opportunities" are worthless scams, suitable only for cleaning toilets and filling landfills. Let's briefly go through some of these "opportunities".

Multi Level Marketing
The theory of MLM is very simple. Instead of spending a lot of time selling a product, you sell a program to sell products. You sign up as many people under you as possible (and under them as well) and you collect a commission for each sale that they make. Virtually all, if not all, of these programs are scams. Their design virtually ensures that the only people who will make any money are those at the top of the pyramid.

Paid-Referrals
Now here is yet another interesting idea. Companies will pay to get referrals. These organizations find those companies and advertise their services. You sign up for a whole lot of programs at once and supposedly get a cut of the fees. Simple, huh? I signed up for quite a few, and I never saw a dime from any of them.

Pay-To-Chat
Yet another interesting idea. As with all programs of this type, the amount of money that you can make is so small as to make it meaningless.

Pay-To-Click
It costs between $2 and $10 to get targeted leads to a website. Why not pay people to click into sites? Well, there are lots of reasons.

Pay-To-Listen
An interesting idea which seems to have never really paid off. These companies would pay you a small amount to display a bar which plays music. As with the pay-to-surf, it appears that the death of the banner ad has destroyed any chance these will survive.

Pay-To-Read-Email
The concept here is simple. Agree to receive some email advertisements, and make some money by reading them. Sounds good? The theory is sound, but the practice turns out to be a waste of time. You can make more money at the local burger joint.

Pay-To-Shop
Collect a few dollars to shop around all over the web. These schemes tend to make a lot of money for the pay-to-shop companies while being stingy with the payouts to people like you and me.

Pay-To-Surf
This type of program was created by a company called AllAdvantage, way back when banner ads actually worked. As a rule, these types of programs are worthless, completely and utterly worthless. These programs were suitable for use in toilet training puppies and lining birdcages even before the banner ad became useless and dot coms became dot bombs.

Pay-To-Take-Surveys
Some companies will pay you to take surveys. Are these worth the time? Hardly.

Sweepstakes
Want to play some games and perhaps win some money? I thought I might like to play. After over 25 hours of internet play (and banner watching) I have still to win a single penny.


Note: There's no such thing in this world as "Easy Money". Remember.. to make an omelette, you need to break a few eggs.

GOD is watching you...

The Eye of God

Claim: Photograph taken by the Hubble Telescope shows the 'Eye of God.'

Status: True.

Origins: It is a picture taken by NASA with the Hubble telescope.



This is a real photograph of the Helix Nebula, although it's technically not a single photograph but rather a composite image formed from several photographs taken by NASA's orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and a land-based telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

This image was NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" for 10 May 2003. The picture's "Eye of God" appellation appears to have been a title coined by an admirer of the photo due to the nebula's resemblance to a human eye, not something designated by NASA.


P/S: I found this rather inspiring, believing and spiritually touched. However, I have no comment on this issue.

Proton Gen.2 = Mercedes C Class Kompressor + Lotus M250 ??

[Click the picture for a bigger version. Original size = 276kb, 1502x1540 pixels.]

As you all know.. Proton cars are very famous with 'original' designs, right?


P/S: Research conducted by an anonymous individual, known by the nickname tW|n_sPaRkZ.