This article is the second in a series of application reviews, useful for professionals in the public event industry.
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
Since the internet, life as a festival and public event professional has become much easier. In some cases the internet saves us lots of money. Take for example SKYPE.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with SKYPE, this is the most popular application that uses the internet to enable you to make (video) calls. You can call for free to more than 20 million other SKYPE users .
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. 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.
What I personally love about Skype is the low price of making international calls. In most cases you pay less than 2 cents per minute. In addition, I like to use my computer’s keyboard to send SMS messages to my contacts on their mobile devices. With a large number of add-ons and easy to use conference call functionality, SKYPE is an ideal application for small and large businesses, including festivals.
Different software companies have made applications that work with SKYPE that allow you, for example, to share your computer screen with other users (great for making (sponsor) presentations, send a fax, record calls, personalized voice mail, etc. Check them out under the ‘Tools->Extras’ menu in your SKYPE dashboard.
Besides the ability to call to landlines or cell phones, you can also receive calls on SKYPE by buying phone numbers in selected countries. This means that you could have various international service numbers that all connect to your computer or SKYPE enabled switchboard.
As a business you can manage accounts for your staff members and assign call credit to each user. Large businesses can integrate their complete telephone system (pbx or sip) with skype. Frequent users, may consider to buy special hardware or phones that combine landlines or mobile phones with SKYPE. For some mobile devices, such as iPhone, applications exist to use your SKYPE via a WIFI connection.
Get connected and safe money. Get SKYPE at www.skype.com !
Jeroen Mourik
Skype ID: jeroen_mourik
>> also read Jeroen's review of Drop Box: http://ifeaeurope.com/news/articles/12-software-for-public-event-organisers
