Now here’s an interesting piece of information. Skype has, as you may be aware of, become hugely popular and has a reported 521 million registered users. It turns out that that is enough to take a considerable chunk of change away from the traditional telephone companies, especially when it comes to those expensive international long-distance calls.

According to a new study by TeleGeography, worldwide international telephone traffic racked up 406 billion minutes of call time in 2009. Contrast this with international call traffic between Skype users (free over the Internet), which was 54 billion minutes, up from 33 billion minutes the previous year.

Now here comes the really amazing thing: If you count international calls between Skype users in with the overall international telephone calls, Skype’s share of the pie is almost 12%.

“The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous,” says Stephan Beckert, a TeleGeography analyst. “Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

And here is another kicker: Skype’s actual share is bound to be even higher than 12%.

Why? Because the numbers above only include calls between Skype users. They don’t include SkypeOut calls, Skype’s Internet-to-telephone pay option. For example, in Q3 2009, Skype had 3.1 billion minutes of SkypeOut calls. Not all will have been international calls, but it’s not an insignificant amount of calling time (12.4 billion minutes in a year).

You could argue that Skype’s incredible growth is a sign of what many have predicted for some time now; sooner or later all calls will be made over the Internet. It’s just a matter of time.

What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

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