Niklas Zennstr�m, the internet entrepreneur behind both Kazaa and Skype, spoke to BBC Click Online about how his two inventions came about, and how broadband and wireless devices are shaping his vision for the future.
There are few people in the world who can claim to have invented something that captured the imagination of hundreds of millions of people. But Niklas Zennstr�m has done it twice.
It all started while he was working for the European low cost telco Tele 2 in the mid-1990s, where he met his friend and colleague Janus Friis. By March 2001, the two of them had created Kazaa and were cashing in on the file-swapping boom kicked off by Napster. What made Kazaa important was that it avoided having centralised lists of what people were swapping. This arm’s length approach kept it, and other file-sharing services like it, out of trouble.
The result was an explosion of music swapping, and movies soon followed with the widespread take-up of broadband.
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