Skype Acquires Qik For $150 Million

The VOiP dominator Skype has acquired Qik for $150 million. Qik is a smartphone service which allows users to stream video from your smart-device. The 60 person startup with offices in California and Russia has gone into final agreements with Skype with Skype’s official announcement probably happening sometime during CES.

Qik has quickly become a very big success with smartphone users, starting out in 2010 they had a user count of about 600,000 and by the end of the year it skyrocketed to 5 million. The huge 2010 success of Qik is due in part to partners like T-Mobile, Sprint, Samsung and Nokia. The huge sponsorship bump was an amazing act and nailing down those sponsors really had an amazing effect on Qik.

Qik is considered the best video streaming option for the Android platform, which also had an amazing popularity spike this last year as well. Qik is also available on over 200 mobile devices running iOS, Symbian, BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile, due to the major sponsorships most come preloaded on a wide variety of mobile devices.

“Skype and Qik share a common purpose of enriching communications with video, and the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership in video by adding recording, sharing and storing capabilities to our product portfolio.” said Tony Bates, from the official Skype blog.

Here is a message from CEO Tony Bates: