Skype has changed the way I do business...

From being a small regional Consulting company limited mostly to doing business in Costa Rica, Skype has given me the ability to do business on a global scale, and to save potential clients in the United States, the cost of a sometimes expensive call to Costa Rica.

It has also given me a suite of powerful communication tools that I can use to communicate with clients and family around the world. I am not at all surprised to find this article from Money.cnn.com.

That people are doing interesting things with Skype, comes as no surprise at all to me. That the media has taken so long to recognize it, is a surprise.

The Utopia Group was an early adopter of Skype in Costa Rica, and we have been using it as our primary form of international communications for over a year.

An excerpt from the Money.cnn.com article:

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Free Internet phone service was always likely to change the world - but until recently we had no idea how. A little more than a year after eBay (Charts) bought Skype for $2.6 billion, the service has become a business tool on a surprising scale.

A million people worldwide, 300,000 of them in the United States, will rely on Skype as their primary means of business communication in 2007, according to telecom analyst Albert Lin at American Technology Research. And those are just the power users: Skype says nearly a third of its 113 million users now log on to make work-related calls.

That suggests the next few months could be a boomtime for brand-new Skype-based business models. What can't you do with an intercom on the Web?

"This is a growth industry," Lin says. "Most people look at Skype and think they're just going to save money. It's only recently you've seen any attempts to turn the technology into another business."

Business models whose time has come

Saving money, of course, can be enough in itself to transform a small business. When Bill Lewis taught software to executives over the phone using a landline, he suffered phone bills as high as $10 an hour and felt tied to the San Francisco area code, where he could get a lot of execs as pupils.

With Skype, Lewis is bringing in the same $5,000 a month he did when working on a landline. (There is, after all, only one of him.) But now he has no overhead from phone charges.

And he's doing it from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he lives two blocks from the beach. He's considering taking on employees and says a small expansion could triple his revenue.

Lewis's business at least was possible before Skype. But more interesting are the ideas that have only now become commercially viable, like that of entrepreneur Mike Hollands.

A former language teacher born in Brazil and schooled in England, Hollands often experienced shortages of fellow teachers. So he tried a few tentative language lessons over Skype, and was delighted to find they worked. He set up his tutorial company, Toniks Languages, in April 2005.

This time Hollands had no trouble with staff shortages: He got 900 applications for 12 virtual tutor positions in less than a week. The tutors, who live around the world, get paid $30 an hour.

If Hollands had to pay conference call fees to set up the group classes, he says, it would cost him $25 an hour and erase his profit. Instead, Toniks is making $40,000 a month.

While I am certainly not making $40k a week utilizing Skype, the potential to explore new markets in a cost effective way is certainly there. While we explore new business opportunities, and continue to grow our business, Skype will likely prove to be an even more important tool.

What is so exciting, is that the internet is turning into a great equalizer for small entrepreneurial businesses like The Utopia Group and Solutions Costa Rica, providing us with cost effective tools that nearly equal the tools available to companies with Million Dollar IT budgets.

The Utopia Group has been a technology innovator in Costa Rica since it's fouding over five years ago.

We installed the first public wireless network in the Country, and have been responsible for countless technology innovations in the Country.

Utopia was also one of the first organizations to test the country's ADSL broadband internet service, and to promote the use of the wireless (GPRS), internet service using smartphones, and Palm Connected organizers with bluetooth connections to GPRS capable handsets. (actualid9-2003.pdf )

Skype has allowed us to broaden our international communications abilities, while maintaining a low cost communications budget. We are looking forward to the day when Skype becomes available on Palm Handhelds, as other VoIP providers have done.

One of the great things about Skype is its API which enables developers to work with clients to embed Skype applications into Enterprise platforms, or to develop add-on functionality like the Skylook product, which I am a big fan of.

Since making the move to Linux, I miss the Skylook functionality, but hope that the popularity of Linux Distros will eventually lead to the Skylook team developing a plug-in for Thunderbird, or some other open source email client.

At any rate, we see Skype as an "enabler," for a number of business opportunities, and will continue to have it as a part of our corporate communications strategy.

Crossposted to Business Blog

Note: Another Contender for the Desktop VoIP Crown is Gizmo, and Free Calls are why!

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