Skype iPhone 3G App Downloaded 5 Million Times

On Sunday, Skype 2.0 was launched for the iPhone 3G, bringing a long-sought feature to the table: making calls over 3G. By now, 5 million users downloaded the application from the iTunes Store, showing just how important this feature was to users.

Unfortunately, the new feature came with an unpleasant announcement: after August 2010, Skype will start charging a monthly fee for the 3G calling feature – on top of whatever fee you’re already paying your mobile operator for data transfer.

Skype promises the fee will be reasonable. “We’re not going to want to price ourselves out of the market. I can’t ignore the fact that consumers (currently) use us for free,” said Russ Shaw, Skype’s general manager for mobile. Still, one cannot help but wonder how the users will react when faced with a double fee for mobile VoIP calls. How do you feel about it? Will you continue using Skype over 3G after the fee is introduced? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Create a Mobile-Friendly Website for Your Business with moBistro

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: moBistro

Quick Pitch: Create your own mobile websites that are compatible on 98% of all smartphones with a simple user backend.

Genius Idea: moBistro is a service that makes it easy for business owners to create mobile versions of their websites without having to do any coding on their own. Many of the features are aimed at restaurant owners, who often have Flash-based websites that break on most mobile phones.

While other sites like MoFuse also offer mobile website creation, moBistro is unique in its restaurant-focused options. Users can easily add in location data, links to external sites like OpenTable, events that can become accessible in a calendar, menus, special offers and more.

Everything on your moBistro site is manageable through a control panel that was designed to be easy to use and operate. When it comes time to serve the website, moBistro will automatically redirect mobile phones to the correct version of the site, depending on what capabilities the phone has.

You can customize moBistro to fit with your business’s branding and color scheme and you can monitor mobile web traffic from Google AnalyticsGoogle AnalyticsGoogle Analytics.

moBistro doesn’t just create the mobile-friendly version of your website; it hosts it too. That’s good for users who don’t want to have to deal with configuring their web server to serve the mobile version of their sites, however, it does make the product more expensive.

While we think the services offered by moBistro are great, we think the pricing — which starts at $19.99 per month — is a bit high for this kind of service. Still, the ability to easily create mobile-friendly content that can work on hundreds of devices without having to do any coding is an idea that should appeal to lots of business owners who are trying to figure out how to best address the mobile web.