Voit, a popular sports equipment brand, is catching up on VoIP according to Blogpulse. It also seems to be stealing mindshare from Vonage.

Skype users share data about themselves in their profiles. SR Consulting sampled 3.9 million profiles for statistics about age, country and gender. Some of their data from October suggests these findings.

Skypers are 30 years old, give or take.

• Average age: 29.7 years
• Mode: 25 years (most common age)
• Percent of users 40 years old and Younger: 80%
• The average age of Skype users within countries ranges from 19 in Lithuania and Bulgaria to 40 in Ecuador.

Oldest countries
Country	Average Age
Ecuador	40
Faroe Islands	39
Kenya	38
New Zealand (Aotearoa)	38
India	37
Sri Lanka	36
New Caledonia	36
South Africa	36
Nigeria	35
Netherlands	35
United States	35
Netherlands Antilles	35

Youngest countries
Country	Average Age
Lithuania	19
Bulgaria	19
Jamaica	20
Latvia	21
American Samoa	22
Macau	22
Myanmar	24
Zimbabwe	24

Some people don't share their age due to perceived age discrimination (too young, too old) and a general sense of privacy.

Europe and Asia beat the Americas.

About 46% of Skypers are in Europe, but Brazil and China have the most Skype users of any country, each with 8.1% of the Skype population.

Skype users found in survey
Continent	Percent in sample
Europe	46%
Asia	28%
North America	10%
South America	10%
Oceania	3%
Africa	2%
Other	1%

Most Populous Countries in Survey with at least 2% of overall population
Country	Percent of Samle
Brazil	8.1%
China	8.1%
United States	7.0%
Taiwan	5.8%
France	5.3%
Germany	5.0%
Poland	4.5%
Japan	4.3%
Great Britain (UK)	3.2%
Netherlands	2.8%
Malaysia	2.5%
Italy	2.4%
	59.0%

Men report their sex more than women.

SR Consulting collected sex data, but 52% of users declined to state. We already know that women often "Decline To State" to avoid problems (harassing phone calls, for example) so this data is not worth sharing, IMHO.

More about the survey

Sebastian Ruell, CEO, said "We comply 100% with the Skype EULA and that we do not collect or store personal data of any kind. We take the privacy of skype users very seriously and avoid data like the person's real name, phone numbers or anything else that could connect the data to an individual person."

Taiwan market: Skype subscriptions exceed the two million mark in July. Subscriptions for the PChome-Skype peer-to-peer (P2P) voice over IP (VoIP) application surpassed two million earlier this month. In addition, the number of paid user subscriptions for the SkypeOut service is close to 150,000.

[DigiTimes]

Skype has an online survey up. It's all about habits and practices - but there seems to have been little thinking on and stretch in terms of options, scales, wants and wishlists. It's not well designed, poorly structured, with many gaps in areas covered, and no real behavioural information being collected. A wasted opportunity!

Just because online surveys are simple doesn't mean they shouldn't be well thought out. It's also more dangerous to have information that is incomplete or poorly collected than to have no information at all. Unfortunately many organisations fall into this trap. There is down and dirty research -- this is not it.

Breaking down the survey to understand the gaps further, there are problems in several areas :

1. Areas of Coverage :

* No demographic profiling - age, gender, income, etc - to contextualise responses

* Inadequate coverage of Skype's offerings - what about conference calling, chat and multi-chat, Skype on PDA's, Skype API, forums - areas of satisfaction and problems with them? For instance, how many have made a conference call with SkypeOut - one problem could be tackling DTMF tones

* No behavioural information of depth and value like buddy lists, minutes and hours spent on each feature, how many failed calls, what percentage is acceptable, what percentage local vs international calls, whether Skype is set to a call-centric or chat-centric mode, etc

* No developer products included : video chat, presence servers, outlook import, other plugins. These form a vital part of the total offering from a customer's point of view, and make the Skype experience richer - it would have been interesting to study awareness, usage and motivations for them.

* No feature comparisons with other products competing in the same space from a user's perspective - IM, other VOIP offerings, even landlines and cell phones - resulting in answers in a vacuum without benchmarks and best-in-class standards that always make responses so much more reliable and meaningful, particularly when satisfaction is involved. For instance, would you say your Skype billing experience is better than or worse than your current cellular provider? Landline carrier? Amazon? Other? NA? What's your best billing experience online?

* Very little space offered for opportunities to improve

* Even less on what Skype really means to users today and how is it changing the way they communicate, impact on their communication behaviour and habits.

* Branding and positioning issues - how is Skype positioned in the customer's mind? What associations, what image, what relationship, strength of stickiness and loyalty? I know Skype is beginning to think of brand - and that's a great step. I also hope that they remember the brand is not just what the company communicates, but as it rests in user's minds and hearts and leaves it imprints. I'd have loved to see some brand-related questions here.

2. Questionnaire design and structure:

* Options and choices (dropdown boxes) provided seem inadequate in most areas. The connection speed options are not customer friendly. Reasons for using don't include - for business, for travel, for connecting with family abroad etc. Another instance:

Why did you start using Skype Voicemail? (check all that apply)

Thought it was cool

Wanted to save money

Wanted to call people abroad

Other

These options make little sense in the context of voicemail - none of the potential reasons for using Voicemail are listed in the options. It seems like these questions have been dumped blindly from the earlier SkypeOut section.

* Areas for improvement in all sections are left as an open-ended space; some amount of stimulus for thought might have been provided for generating more meaningful suggestions. For instance, for Voicemail, there are so many possiblities - from saving copies to sending group messages or not having to listen to your message for the 5th time when sending.

* Scale used for satisfaction - the 3-point scale : very satisfied-satisfied-not satisfied again doesn't really offer up much - first, there aren't enough gradations to really determine satisfaction to make it a good customer service scale and second, satisfaction must always be measured against perceived benchmarks, without which it can be meaningless.