Skype made the Call Center news the other day for their deal with IVR maker Angel.com to provide web-based speech-enabled applications to users of Skype's free Internet voice and video phone service. Press releases stated Skype's subscriber base at about 94 million people. Which, according to the company, is up almost double from where they were last fall. How'd they do that?

I know two people who use Skype, but I should know more: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 298,618,802 people in America right now. If all of Skype's users were in the U.S., nearly 1 out of 3 Americans would be subscribers. Granted, one of Skype's big selling points is free worldwide calling -- their users are all over the globe. But a lot of them must be here.

Wagstaff, who's based in Indonesia, counted 3,633,607 users online when he checked during the day in the Eastern hemisphere. He writes:

"OK, allowing for people who are 'away' (I believe this excludes them from being counted) and for folk who only go online occasionally, and allowing for the vagaries of actually reporting the total number of users online (actually, another 6,000 users have appeared since I started writing this paragraph), I can't help wondering whether the 100 million figure is a) a wild exaggeration, down to people registering twice, b) people registering and then ditching it or c) the number of users that appears in the Skype program is just not reflecting reality."

Wagstaff does say everyone he knows is on Skype. We have no reason not to believe Skype's numbers -- it's just that they're amazing. I guess I know the wrong people. Do you know anyone on Skype?