They did it. Much was talked about Skype in the last months. Now they took the first step for a great success story and received $18.8 million in Series B.

As users of Skype don't pay anything as of now, it can use effects of viral (there always have to be two people on a phone :-) marketing at a great scale. So marketing is very cheap (especially compared to competitors like Vonage and the company has seen more than 8 million downloads so far. Skype only maintains some root servers for call routing. The product is clever and works better then any VoIP product ever before (especially the NAT technique).

If Skype introduces gateways to the Classical phone networks & extra services like answering machines it will have no difficulties charging a considerable amount (5-15$ month + call fees). So it won't be too difficult to make their services profitable. However I guess we will see an early acquisition here. Probably some Telco's have already submitted a bid :-)

##Update: Michel mailed in this article. It seems BT is seeing Skype as a threat -

"BT attacked the nascent service last week, saying that Skype rhymed with hype and claiming its service was "primitive" compared with a rival product BT would launch this year."

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