Well I’ve had skype for a little while now and have not used it a great deal, mainly because trying to remote control my luddite family in the UK through the process would, ironically enough, involve alot of expensive phone calls.
As luck would have it I was able to travel back to the UK for christmas, and get my mum and dad on skype and really start putting it though its paces, and I am gobsmacked by the things I can do with this, I mean its just brilliant.
Here’s an interesting scenario, skype has a feature called skypeOUT(not gay, it means you can make outgoing calls to landline phone numbers) for most worldwide calls it costs 0.017 euros a minute, dirt cheap. They also have skypeIN, which allows you to have a local phone number which landline phones can call into. skypeIN essentially gives you a local phone number and voicemail. Now once you have this setup, you can also have skype forward any unanswered calls to any phone number in the world. The upshot of all this is that if you call my Miami number it forwards the call to my parents house in England, the person calling me only pays what it would cost to call my miami number, and I pay 0.017 euros a minute (that is pennies a minute).
