Skype Labs opens Bay Area office

"Skype Labs is a new R&D center located in the Bay Area focused on next generation technologies for Skype which will be applicable over the next one to five years. The initial areas of work will include security, signaling and call control for audio, video and presence, p2p and collaboration."

No specifics on where in the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area the office is based. Skype has a few technical staff working in San Jose at the Skype Inn office and in San Francisco.

The office will report to Daniel Berg, Skype's CTO. It will be independent of Skype's other development centers in Tallinn, Tartu, Stockholm, and Prague.

Skype's outside dependence on the Joltid p2p engine and Google/On2's video codec may benefit from the lab. The first three of the four research areas (1. Security. 2. Signaling and call control, the layer above p2p. 3. peer-to-peer.) focus on Skype's network fabric and infrastructure. Collaboration research should support new features and increase Skype's reach into new market segments.

Skype is mum on current lab members, the lab director, specific projects, and how much the existing Skype product council will influence project selection. By my estimate, the Bay Area lab has an annual budget around US$2 million.

14 posted job openings: Software Engineers x5, Quality Engineer x5, Technical Product Manager/Product Owner, Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master, Video Codec Developer, Experience Manager, Skype for Mac/Linux.

tags: skype, research, labs, p2p, video, presence, collaboration, sanfrancisco, bayarea, lab

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P.S. The photo is of workers repairing the San Francisco Bay Bridge this weekend.