As Yogi Berra might say, “it’s BitWine deja vu all over again.” Skype is now competing with this service with Skype Prime available in the 3.1 beta version [download]. Prime is described by Skype as:

it enables paid Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls. You can charge other people for calling you either a one-off fee or by the minute. Conversely, if you are the caller, you can call experts who charge for their services, and you can then pay the fee and access the expertise that the other call party provides.

SkypeJournal — no, they aren’t dead — extracts the Skype Prime details:

- To get registered to charge for calls via Skype Prime navigate to TOOLS -> Earn Money with Skype Prime

- Skype takes 30%
- 120 wait time to actually get paid (via PayPal) and no interest on the money:

They don’t know how much money they’ll need to refund due to fraud, user error, software glitches, etc. So this is their contingency fund. They are mostly managing two risks. Credit card fraud (not getting paid by buyers) and refund risk (having to give money back to buyers).

- $30/hour is minimum bill rate because time is worth more than a penny a minute.

Not sure how much I’ll use this, but it’s a worthwhile feature to have in the Skype toolbox.