Kim Dotcom Hopes To Bury Skype With Launch Of Encrypted MegaChat

If there's one thing Internet legend Kim Dotcom despises, it's being spied on. Likewise, he hates that governments take it upon themselves to spy not only on him, but everyone. Not long after his Auckland mansion was raided some three years ago, his love for privacy and security only skyrocketed. What eventually came of that was Mega, a cloud service that offers an impressive 50GB of free storage, as well as promises that your data will be safe from prying eyes.

While it's important to secure our data, whether it consists of images or documents, it's likewise important to secure our conversations. It's the belief of many that it doesn't matter what's being said - we should all have the right to privacy. For probably obvious reason, Dotcom doesn't trust most companies out there that store our data en masse, including Google and Microsoft. Thus, he wants to create a new communication service, which he hopes will eat straight into Skype's market.

We reported on this venture last month, and today, the first bit of functionality rolls out: video calls. Dotcom says that his "Skype-killer" will roll out in parts, with text chat and video conferencing to come soon.

#Mega has over 15 million registered users now. I think #MegaChat could elevate us to 100+ million users by the end of 2015. #Prediction

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) January 22, 2015

A major feature of Mega's chat service, aptly named MegaChat, is that it can be used right inside of a Web browser, rather than through a dedicated app like with Skype. As I have absolutely no contacts on Mega, I was unable to test out the video chat service, but if you have, we'd love to hear your thoughts about its performance and reliability.

As Dotcom's tweet above highlights, he has some major confidence that MegaChat is in fact going to be worthy of the "Mega" name.