Fri, Aug 19, 2005 page12

• Skype's moguls show it's chic to be a geek

  COOL DUDES Unlike Microsoft's Bill Gates, a new generation of Internet tycoons has made it chic to be a geek -- meet Zennstrom and Friis, as covered in `Vanity Fair'

  • THE OBSERVER
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  The front cover shows Jennifer Aniston in a floaty pyjama top and nothing else, as photographed by Mario Testino in Malibu. Inside are glossy adverts for Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chloe, Burberry and Prada. So why, amid Vanity Fair magazine's pungent mix of glamor and politics, has space been found for two computer geeks number-crunching in a barren office in Estonia?

  The answer is that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are billed as "Two Wild and Crazy Moguls ... the elusive entrepreneurs who are transforming the way the world communicates." They are credited with one of the biggest shake-ups of the US$300 billion global telephone industry since Alexander Graham Bell made the first call in 1876. No phone is safe from their ambition to replace traditional fixed-line networks with Skype, a service that allows people to speak to each other over the Internet -- free.

  Smart casual

  Zennstrom, a 1.94m-tall Swede, and Friis, a 1.97m-tall Dane, are pictured reclining amid the mirrors and cream leather sofas of the fashionable Kingly Club in London. Their dress is smart casual: snappy suits and tieless, open-necked shirts. The multi-millionaires are "equipped with boyish energy and one lazy eye each," spending their time in London, Luxembourg and Skype's technical HQ in Tallinn, Estonia. But Vanity Fair's profile opens with the cool Scandinavians surrounded by the Ferraris, yachts and boutique streets of Cannes.

  Zennstrom and Friis are presented as the embodiment of "geek chic," a niche that has always eluded Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates, but which the next Dr. Who, David Tennant, has declared he is aiming for. A new book, Gee Chic, by Neil Feineman, claims: "After decades, if not centuries, of persecution, ridicule and never, never getting the girl, geeks are hot. They are on the cover of magazines, win awards at the Oscars and the Baftas, eat at the best tables of the best restaurants, and park their Ferraris in front of their million-dollar houses. They are the geeks, and their time has come."

  Zennstrom, 39, and Friis, 29, tick a fair number of the above boxes. Jo Mosaku, a key business adviser to the two after they launched Skype two years ago, said: "They are technology freaks and not the kind of guys who seek publicity, but a Vanity Fair shoot in Cannes gives them a broader appeal. We drink beer in the Electric and play pool at the Elbow Room."

  Runaway success

  Zennstrom and Friis -- the brains behind the music download business Kazaa, which they left in 2002 because of legal actions launched by the music industry -- have earned comparisons with two of their heroes, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the multi-billionaire founders of Internet search engine Google. Like Google, their idea's simplicity and obvious consumer benefits have rapidly turned the small start-up into a runaway success. Fortune magazine's list of the most powerful people in business ranked them No. 1 in a sub-group dubbed "The Disrupters," mavericks with ideas that "give corporate titans the cold sweats."

  Skype software turns a computer with a broadband connection into a telephone, making it possible to speak via a headset -- free -- to anyone in the world who also has Skype, as long as their computer is switched on. Zennstrom said last month: "I think charging for calls belongs to the last century." For a small charge, usually a few cents per minute, users can also sign up to dial traditional phone numbers anywhere in the world.

  Worldwide appeal

  Skype software has been downloaded 148 million times in more than 210 countries. When it notched 10 billion minutes of worldwide call time in June, Friis noted in a blog: "Skype was released in August 2003. We hit 1 billion minutes served in July 2004. Now, it's 10 billion minutes in June 2005. So it took roughly the same time to get from 0 to 1 billion, as from 1 billion to 10 billion. Does this mean we'll be able to celebrate 100 billion next May? Who knows?"
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