Skype has announced that the amount of time its customers have spent chatting on the free Skype-to-Skype voice and video call service has hit the 100 billion minute mark.

According to Skype, that's one minute of talk time for every man, woman and child that has ever lived. The 100 billion minute total works out as 69,444,444 days and 190,258 years.

Skype, which was launched in 2003 and was bought by eBay in 2005 for £1.3bn, now has 276 million registered users worldwide. Thirty million users joined the service in the last 3 months of 2007.

The VoIP service celebrated the 100 billion milestone by comparing it to another one, achieved by McDonald's, that took a lot longer. A statement from Skype said: "It took McDonald's nearly 40 years to serve 100 billion hamburgers (from 1955 to 1994). And it's taken Skype just over four years to hit 100 billion free minutes mark which is pretty amazing!"

Villu Arak, writing on the Skype blog, said: "This figure is so mind-numbingly large that it's nigh impossible to wrap my head around it. (Even if attempted, the exercise would likely result in a headache of cosmic proportions that no amount of pickle juice can possibly cure.)"

http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2008/02/one_hundred_billion_reasons_to.html

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