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May 23, 2007

Skype VOIP USB Phone To Be Sold In WalMart

The Skype Voip USB phone and other Skyp equipment will soon be sold in Walmart. Skype and WalMart jointly announced an agreement to sell Skype phone equipment in 1800 of its 3300 stores.

The dedicated Skype section will feature handsets, headsets and webcams designed to work with Skype, a provider of free and very cheap long-distance calls, including to phone numbers abroad. Wal-Mart will also sell the first prepaid cards for Skype calls to be sold in this country, the companies were announcing Monday.

The new section at more than half of Wal-Mart's roughly 3,300 U.S. stores will feature Skype-compatible gear made by Motorola Inc., Plantronics Inc., Logitech International SA, Royal Philips Electronics NV and others.

Those manufacturers already sell those products in stores on their own through their own relationships with Best Buy Co. and Circuit City Stores Inc., but Wal-Mart will be the first to offer a wide selection in one place.

Wal-Mart also sells products that work with Vonage, which also transmits calls over an Internet connection but tends to more closely replicate the experience of using a traditional telephone. By contrast, while there are a growing number of cordless phones compatible with Skype, the service is commonly used by plugging a headset into a computer and clicking on names in a buddy list like those found in an instant messaging program.

With tens of millions of regular users, Skype has developed a huge following, especially among international callers. But the service is not as well known to the general public, even among people with high-speed Internet connections.

"We think there will be a lot of Wal-Mart shoppers who will not be familiar with Skype," said Don Albert, general manager for Skype North America, a unit of eBay Inc.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at May 23, 2007 3:47 PM

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