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SKYPE your expedition!
13:34 p.m. EST Nov 2, 2004
Hanging out in Antarctica gateway Punta Arenas for 45 days was great and we stayed in touch with business and family using the GSM mobile phone while strolling the shores of Magellan Strait .
Expedition finished the phone bill arrived. Turned out the greedy bastards charged twice the cost of a satellite phone call, or $2 a minute. In fact, the bill exceeded our 65 day expedition sat phone cost!
Pitching sponsors for sat phone costs is standard procedure, but financial help to call your family and friends from Kathmandu is not something you want to bring to the board room. So the solutions is - cut the cost.
How about paying nothing?
This is how you do it: Bring a headset with microphone ($15) to any Internet café in the world. Download and install Skype and start talking to your Skype friends for free. Quality ranges anywhere from OK to excellent and without doubt on par with landlines. One of our team Skyped in free from Bangkok airport this spring – excellent quality.
Grandma doesn’t have a computer? Not free but cheap.
Solution is using SkypeOut. Buy credits online and call almost any phone number from your computer to rock-bottom prices. Call Europe, US or Australia from Nepal for 2 cents a minute! And you can keep easy track of the cost at the Skype start page.
After KaZaA
The SKYPE creators Scandinavian Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis are also the creators of the most downloaded application ever on the internet, KaZaA. The file sharing application (read free music downloads) have been downloaded 378 million times until now.
When we jumped on the Skype train last year it had just over one million downloads: Now it's up to 20 million and 1 million simoultaneous users!
The communication revolution is here over internet and VOIP (Voice over IP). The Skype guys are killing the competition by offering easy, free solutions – and it’s global.
SKYPE from your hotel room?
Calling home from most foreign hotel rooms is insanely costly: Connect your laptop to the hotels in-room wifi high speed, start up Skype and start talking. Or, use the rooms phone to connect to internet through a local number that will be free or very cheap. Now, the cost to dial home is cut from 1- 3$/minute to a few cents.
Later this week:
Minisize SKYPE
SKYPE sat phone
Image ExWeb office people use SKYPE to stay in touch with Global community.
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