40 Million People: How Far We've Come
Between three and four millennia ago, sometime between 2000 BC and 1000 BC, the world’s population stood at 40 million people. Early civilizations like the Egyptians, Phoenicians and the Minoans focused their trading efforts on the sea, building centers of commerce all along the Mediterranean. Letters using these early peoples’ alphabet took weeks or months to travel on the sea or overland by boat, horse or foot.
Well, the world certainly has changed a lot since then. Today, we have seven billion people on Earth, and there are centers of commerce almost everywhere. With changes in technology and mechanized forms of transportation, letters (surprisingly) still takes days to get from person to person, while email takes just seconds.
But one of the biggest changes is one we reached today – when 40 million concurrent users were signed onto Skype all at once. This is a massive new milestone for a simple piece of software that helps make meaningful connections a cool part of people’s lives every single day.
Think about this: thanks to Skype you can make audio calls, video chat, send SMS and instant messages, get voicemails or share files with anyone anywhere on Skype quickly and easily at low to no cost.
So much for those long boat trips.
We thank you all for taking the long journey with us!