Skype celebrates 5 years of innovation with its Labs

I realize that just earlier today I talked about Skype, but this time around I thought we would tackle a more pleasant subject. Today the phone and chat service is celebrating the fifth anniversary of the innovations emerging from its Labs division. That’s a section of many companies today which is tasked with finding new additions that bring real improvement to the user experience.

The service cites some real world numbers to bring things into perspective. For instance, it boasts more than 300 million monthly users, a staggering figure to perhaps anyone but Facebook. It also boasts an excessive 2 billion minutes of audio and video calls  — not per month, but PER DAY. Try and put that one into perspective, if you can — and yes, I know you’ll find examples, and I look forward to reading them.

The Microsoft-owned service also points out “we are a multicultural and geographically diverse applied research team. In Skype Labs, we have used our expertise in audio, video, computer vision, networking, machine learning, data mining, statistics, and quality of experience to create and deliver some of the fundamental and innovative core technologies that have contributed to Skype’s success”.

The information, along with a hearty thank you, comes from Adriana Dumitras, director of research at Skype Labs. She concludes by hinting at future innovations that lay just around the corner. While these, quite obviously, are not named, there was allusion made to machine learning and closer collaboration between groups within the service.