Skype Hiring 20-30 New Engineers for its Mobile Team; Likely to Add Video Calling
GigaOM is reporting that Skype is looking to ramp up hiring very soon, with a large portion of their hires being for their mobile engineering team. They report that as many as 20-30 new engineers will be brought in to tackle their mobile offering – something that’s going to be very important going into 2011 as we see new Android tablets introduced from a variety of different manufacturers.
GigaOM didn’t say how many of the new hires would be for their Android efforts, but they did single out iOS and Android as the two platforms for which they were looking for developers. If we assume that half of the 20-30 new engineers will be focusing on the Android-based product, then that’s a lot of horsepower behind a product that desperately needs work. Even just 5 of those engineers would help.
While the latest version of Skype is miles ahead of the Skype Lite beta we had to put up with a while ago, it’s still quite bad. WiFi calling is great, but people want to be able to call over their 3G networks to save money. That’s the main reason it’s only enjoying 3 stars in the market opposed to 4 or 4 and a half.
But I’m not so sure it’s a technical issue. In fact, I’m almost 100% certain it’s not: what’s more likely is carrier resistance. Of course they won’t want you to use Skype over using their voice network: you’d never get close to that overage mark if that were the case! Another feature we’ve been waiting for is video calling, and I’m sure this is what the added firepower is for.
Skype originally promised it’d be out before the end of the year, but I have a feeling they are having difficulties meeting that window. While competitors make their way to market with their own video-calling solutions, users are beginning to dump Skype to look for alternatives, and they just can’t have that. It’s good to see they’re finally getting a move on, but they’d better hurry before it’s too late.