Skype = Internet Telephony

It's well known the fact that Skype has millions of users from all over the world, and no other company involved in the Internet telephony competition manages to challenge
Skype and to gather so many customers. A recent research conducted by Ipoque revealed that "Skype is by far the most popular Internet telephony application" but the VoIP technologies are used only by 30 percent of the total number of web users. Sure, it might sound less important but, when we think that Skype has almost 95 percent of these users (which obviously means almost 30 percent of the total Internet consumers), it may catch your attention.

In comparison with the VoIP market, the instant messaging battle records impressive numbers, as lots of users from all over the world are communicating via Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger or any other instant messenger. And according to Ipoque's study, 60 percent of the Internet users in the Middle East use such tools. "In Germany, however, it is only 17 percent."

Another important Internet competition is represented by the video sharing technologies which record impressive audience. In fact, it's well known that Google's YouTube lures millions of users to its page every day, so I guess it's no secret this type of technologies are quite popular among the Internet consumers. Joost, the recently released platform described as a potential YouTube killer, didn't manage to gather so many users so the Google technology is still the leader in a category with several other famous players such as MSN Video, Dailymotion or Metacafe.

"Joost does not yet have a significant relevance, despite its high media presence. Quite the opposite can be said about Flash movies embedded in Web sites like YouTube, which produced considerably more traffic. This and other forms of video streaming generated eight percent of the Internet traffic during the measurement period," it is mentioned in the research.