There’s been a good run of Skype news lately. Delfi (Estonian) is reporting a change-up in the management of Skype’s Estonian office. Tiit Paananen, who joined the company in 2005, will take over daily management of the Estonian office, as well as head of Skype’s engineering team and technical training. Paananen was born in Estonia and attended the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. Sten Tamkivi, who lead the growth of Skype’s original Estonian office and is the current Site Leader of Skype Estonia, will go to Stanford for a year as part of Microsoft and Skype’s investment in the development of key personnel, and will stay with the company. Both Tamkivi and Paananen joined the company at roughly the same time.
This comes off the heels of Skype’s release of the beta client for Windows phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barclona. Microsoft promises that a full client will be released around April, but currently the app is only available in English, and cannot run in the background– meaning that the application must be open to send or receive calls and messages. Microsoft acquired the VOIP company for $8.5 billion in June.
And on February 24th, Skype announced 32 million people were concurrently online at the same time, and just three days later they hit a new milestone of 34 million concurrent users. Perhaps we’ll see another jump once Windows Phone users can multitask VOIP applications.
