Skype Gets Into Financial Transactions

Skype is moving into the transactions space, the companys CEO and founder Niklas Zennstrom announced Tuesday at VON. The company, which has more than 171 million users, now offers a variety of services and features including the ability for users to send money to each other, an online marketplace and a local business listing search engine.

Send Money uses Paypal technology to enable Skype users to send money via the service. Many Skype users have friends and family on the other side of the planet said Zennstrom, so this service is ideal for them. It takes communications one step further by adding transactions and sending money, he added.

A Skype user can send money by simply logging onto his or her online Paypal account and choosing the amount to be sent to the other Skype user.

Also at the show in San Jose, Calif., Zennstrom discussed Skype Prime, which lets Skype users sell their services to others within the Skype community. The goods for sale could be anything from IT support to foreign language tutoring, Zennstrom said.

Meanwhile, Skype Find is a search engine of sorts that is aimed at local business listings, with an integrated click-to-call VoIP option.

And because there are so many Skype users today, more application developers are interested in targeting them. Thats why the company recently launched Skype Extras, an ecosystem for third-party developers. More than 7 million extras have already been downloaded.

Skype www.skype.com