Skype was founded in 2003. It’s based in Luxembourg, with offices in Europe, the US and Asia. It’s owned by an investor group led by Silver Lake and which includes eBay Inc, Joltid Limited and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz.

Responsible for 8% of global international calling minutes, and with its users making 3.1 billion minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles in the third quarter of 2009, Skype is a leading global internet communications company. And of course, Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls are completely free. In the third quarter of 2009, Skype users made 27.7 billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls, and over a third of these were video calls.