I work with a Polish attorney who uses a VoIP service called Gadu-Gadu. So, today, I stopped into her office and she gave me a quick overview of the service: It basically functions like Yahoo IM with voice, combined with Yahoo groups, and Skype-out (for a fee).

Anyway, the new version of Gadu-Gadu was apparently launched on September 1st and there have been one million downloads of this polish-language VoIP service (maybe more…the one million mark was reached in September…). And Gadu-Gadu has ten employees! I think that number of downloads is staggering, particularly because it was only earlier this year that Poland topped one million broadband users.

As always with IM / VoIP services, there is the problem of non-interconnection of networks. I cannot talk to someone on Gadu-Gadu from my Yahoo IM. While there have been some moves in the right direction in this industry, it’s unfortunate to see new communications technologies that create islands of user-groups, in this case Polish users.