The social networking site of Skype started out as a small business venture but in just a few years turned into a company that was sold for 2.6 billion dollars and it now used for educational purposes as well as entertainment.
Before a couple weeks ago, I had never heard of Skype.com. Then my mother introduced me to the free internet telephone that you can also hook up to a web camera to see the other person. I was amazed and intrigued. Who came up with it? If it is free, how do they make money? I started to do research and realized that this is possibly going to be as big as Myspace or Facebook.The first article I read was Skype:How a Startup Harnessed the Hoopla. This article out of Business Week talked about how Skype was sold. There were many different talks with different companies and how the bidders swirled around them. There were talks with Google and other large companies but they could not come to an agreement of price. In the end talks with Ebay lead to the sale of what was once a tiny internet company that did not have the intent to build big and sell high in a short amount of time. The market was right as well as the price and they found the perfect match with Ebay.
The second article that I read was Language Learning in Tandem via Skype. This scholarly article from The Reading Matrix had a completely different take on what Skype was trying to achieve. It talked about how Skype was marketed for learning foreign languages and it made it easy for people from all over the world to communicate with the touch of a button and talk to each other for very cheap across the world. The startup is user friendly, there is an option to use the voice function or to instant message and not much technology is required. “Skype, as reported in the website page ‘About Skype,’is available in 27 languages and is the fastest growing worldwide software for voice communication.”(Elia) The trend is catching on very fast. The article switches back to the focus of education and how students are able to learn different languages from each other. Tandem learning and “skypecasting” (taken from pod casting in the Elia article) are incorporated into the function of the service.
The scholarly article is more complex to read but definitely give information that is much more useful. It has an introduction, history of the company, and talks about how it relates to education, how fast the company is growing. The scholarly article has endnotes, references and a formal introduction and conclusion as well as a short summary about the author. The popular article is easy to read but does not give half as much information and no statistics of how the company is doing. There is no clear direction as to where they want their business to go or what they are doing to get it there. It only explained how they sold the company. The scholarly article was much longer but had relevant interesting information about the company.
It was a little difficult finding relevant articles on Skype since it is a newer company. I thought that these two articles did a very good job showing the differences how an article can be informational or to fill space with not a lot of useful content. I do think that they both made the point that Skype is a very important company that is in the business of doing things the right way. They were sold to Ebay, which is a very reputable company and they are trying to take the Skype way of communication to another level for the entire world to see.