Niklas Zennstrom, founder of the globally popular VOIP serviceSkype, is setting his sights on what may prove his toughest challenge yet – channeling funds into innovative Chinese start-ups with hopes of bringing them to the international stage. The Swedish entrepreneur believes that China is a well-functioning market for tech startups. “There is lots of capital and talent. It is a fast-growing market, and there are markets for public offerings.” He is actually particularly interested in games, which makes perfect sense as China has a rapidly growing game development community that is starting to develop for overseas markets....

This post is from May 26th BUT Skype is down again. Details of the most recent outagecan be found here. Skype’s telephony service appears to be suffering an outage, with many users all over the world unable to use the service using their desktop clients or not able to access the Skype website. At first it appeared that the issue would was just affecting Windows clients, but after tests at The Next Web, we have found that Mac and Linux clients are also having difficulty accessing the service....

“We’re proud to announce the public release of Skype Beta and the arrival of P2P Telephony! Skype allows anyone to experience free, unlimited, high-quality voice communication over the Internet. Skype software is free to download and you can always get the latest version byclicking here.” Skype made thatannouncementon 29th August, 2003…which meanstodayis its 8th birthday. And what an 8-years it has been for the P2P VoIP platform. It was bought by eBay for $2....

Skype has today officiallylaunchedthe latest version of its Mac app. The app, whicharrived in betain November, has the headline new feature of group video calling. The company has responded to complaints about the beta version and made some refinements. The UI has been refined to take up less space, and the app’s minimum window size is now much smaller. Also, white space in IM windows has been reduced, the contacts monitor has been made easier to find, full screen video chat has been reinstated and sending IM messages while on a call has been made easier....

Six days after it gotEU approval for its acquisitionof Skype, Microsoft hasofficially announcedthe world’s number one VOIP service will become a new business division within the company, welcoming the real-time communications company and its employees all over the world. The announcement follows an$8.5 billion acquisition in May, which both companies approved, but had to wait for anti-competition and regulatory approvals before the merge became official. Skype’s operations will not be largely affected, its CEO Tony Bates will continue to lead the Skype team but will assume the title of president of the Skype Division of Microsoft immediately, directly reporting to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer....