Skype, the global Internet communications company, celebrates the first anniversary of its Skype Developers Program. In a year, the program has attracted more than 3,500 developers worldwide to create applications that work with Skype.

Designed to encourage and support innovative development on the Skype Application Protocol Interface (API), the Skype Developers Program has led to hundreds of products. The initiative helps drive the growth of the Skype ecosystem and helps extend the range of products and features that people enjoy. Moreover, the program has opened new ways for developers to turn their passion into an attractive source of income.

Skype's API - available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux - is free for anyone to use and develop both commercial and non-commercial applications. In the past year, the program has supported the creation of more than 300 software applications and over 100 Skype Certified hardware products.

In the coming year, Skype will focus on growing the program further by providing additional support to the developer community, particularly in North America.

Skype believes in working closely with its developers to spur innovative integration with Skype. In response to developer feedback, Skype will work over the next year to enable deeper integration. Skype is particularly interested in:

-- New APIs, covering the areas of SMS, voice access, call transfer, plug-in, COM4Web and Skypecasts

-- Access to Skype's 100 million member community with third-party application search, trial and purchase functionality within Skype software

-- Closer integration with Skype software via a user interface plug-in framework

"The Skype Developers Program has been extremely successful and we've seen some excellent ideas that benefit our users," said Lenn Pryor, head of Skype Developers Program. Now, with more than 100 million registered users in the Skype community, our developers can tap into this market to build successful businesses and help increase profits."

Skype offers a variety of tools and resources for members of its Developers Program, including:

-- The Skype API, which allows developers to build applications and bring them to market quickly, including a managed code wrapper for COM and ActiveX controls to enable developers to quickly and easily build Skype enabled applications.

-- A Developer Zone Web site for access to tools, sample code, technical documentation, release notes, technical support and more.

-- Member Forums, which enable online discussions with other members of the Skype developer community.

-- Certification program to certify products to ensure they're give your users an optimal experience when using Skype. Becoming a Skype certified partner helps businesses to easily target mass market and provides companies good association with the Skype brand.

The Skype Developers Program has a broad range of application developers who include individuals, merchants and service providers, as well as independent, commercial and enterprise software vendors. Members are creating a wide variety of solutions and products. Examples include:

-- Tellme - a provider of Internet-based voice services, developed the first consumer voice applications to use IP infrastructure for both the transport provided by Skype and content (VoiceXML) powered by Tellme. The applications run on Tellme's network and can be found by visiting the Skype Developer Zone at share.skype.com/directory/voice_services/.

-- Salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, has created a Skype-Salesforce integration - available for free - that will voice-enable all of the more than 250 applications on the AppExchange. Customers have the ability to integrate and deploy Skype along with any number of other on-demand applications via the AppExchange to an existing Salesforce implementation. AppExchange can be found at http://www.appexchange.com.

-- Vapps - a global supplier of VoIP conference call solutions, Vapps recently announced an initiative to provide unlimited, free conference calling for up to 500 participants to Skype's 100 million registered users through Highspeedconferencing.com.