Skype in Tallinn is probably out drinking with Henry Gomez right now. He is excited about his role as Skype's leader of North America.

Henry Gomez showing off Sype's North American Headquarters, his cubicle at eBay's San Jose offices.

His goal for next year? Make Skype a household name in North America, but especially in the United States.

What can one man do?

From Get Skype to Join Skype. Hank retells the story of the great eBay outage of 1999. The founders gave 500 customer names to each eBay employee. They shut down operations for a week to call every customer, to apologize, and to listen. eBay can not only share that level of customer commitment with the Skype family, they can bring their formal methods - like training, the Pink teams, their forum moderation - to NorthAm. The broad mass of Skype users haven't flocked around shared interests and news formed, so there is much for Skype to do.

Buy Skype Here. Retailing is not just a holiday strategy. It connects brand awareness with the opportunity to act, in familiar surroundings. Watch as Skype continues rolling out retail distribution of Skype samplers (the branded impulse buy) and Skype certfied product (license revenue). What started in the U.S. with RadioShack and Brightpoint can, with a short track record, expand to the electronics superchains, WiFi hotspot operators and other touchpoints where people buy computers, telephony, and accessories. For millions, their first Skype experience will be a gift pack or a merchandise display.

Skype inside. NorthAm BizDev will have a role in bundling Skype offers and products with other goods and services. I can't wait for the Skype2 video to become a compelling product (not even close at the moment) so all the consumer products companies that make you look and sound good can jump in. Henry is not responsible for engineering, but he will be driving many of these kinds of alliances.

eBayers, this is Skype. Watch too for the NorthAm-centric PayPal and eBay to gradually expose their customers to the Skype identity network (Skype names, authentication, credits) and Skype presence (SkypeMe buttons). Skype names, especially one-off names, carry less personal risk and exposure than giving out your email address and phone number. As the eBay community brings itself into the Skype cloud, each will have a chance to bring their own personal and workplace social networks into Skype. With maybe 400k active NorthAm ebayers, this should be good for at least 2-4 million more local registrations.

Marcom Classic. And then there is traditional marketing communcations. Some are inexpensive, like sophisticated media relations; Skype is still a new name and VoIP a new idea to most tech columnists in the U.S.. Skype has yet to register for product placements in Hollywood, television and game productions. Is it too early for television commercials? How about online advertising? Can Skype afford the heavy ad budgets of AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or eBay?

Of course Mr. Gomez won't do this on his own. He is staffing a new organization to execute on this charter. And you can be sure they won't fit in his cube.