Disruptive Telephony

The fruits of the eBay purchase of Skype continue to start appearing... today Skype released a 3.2 beta for Windows (sorry Mac & Linux fans) which has as it's main feature the ability to send money to another user via PayPal (provided both users have PayPal accounts).

Rather than write more here about the feature, I'll just point you over to Skype Journal where Phil Wolff has already provided a walk-through of the Send Money feature (as well as the nice graphic I used in this post). 

It's an interesting addition... as we briefly chatted about in Skype Journal's public chat today, this has a bit of a potential to take some money away from Skype Prime, although probably not much.  If you were in a call and wanted to charge someone for the call, you could ask them to send you money via PayPal.  In contrast to Skype Prime, you could ask them to send you any amount you wanted... and you would get the money immediately (versus the 4-month hold of Skype Prime).  I don't think it will impact Skype Prime too much, though, because the process to send money via PayPal is more involved... Skype Prime makes it extremely simple.  We'll see... personally I think the jury is still out on whether or not people will use Skype Prime.  Time will tell.

As noted in the Skype blog post, the 3.2 beta also simplifies access to your Skype account info.  Previously, you had to login to Skype's web page to do everything... now, as Phil shows in another walkthrough, it's all right inside the Skype client.  There's also an ability to easily update your picture with a webcam directly inside the Skype client, which I'm sure some folks will have fun with.  The Skype blog also indicates you can now import contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail and GMail... firing another shot across the bow at those three titans of the consumer email world.

I'm sure there will be some other things found in the release, too, but for the moment it seems to be primarily about sending money...  (and anyone who wants to test sending me money via PayPal is welcome to do so... I'll even send it back to you, minus a, say, 10% "experimentation fee" ;-)