 "World's highest Skype call made for charity from Mount Everest using an HTC One")
Mount Everest, apart from being every mountaineer’s dream to climb, is slowly becoming a good asset for promoting a cause. A couple of days back, a post came up on the Skype blog stating that the world’s highest mountain (above sea level that is) saw its first Skype call. The call was made by British commercial airline pilot Daniel Hughes using an HTC One. Hughes climbed Everest to raise £1 million for the Comic Relief anti-poverty charity.
According to the blog, the charity climb was done to promote the cause and get one million people to donate a single pound. Preparation for the endeavor took Hughes two years, from 2011 to 2012, which included raising the funds for the climb, to train and wrestle an agreement with the band Moby to use their music to promote his climb.
Mount Everest becomes the site for the world’s highest Skype call, using an HTC One
The climb itself was mainly sponsored by HTC and satellite company Inmarsat. Hughes started the climb in May and was seen blogging and making Skype calls all the way. The Brit commercial pilot finally reached the summit on May 19, where he put on a red clown nose, which is characteristic of the Comic Relief charity, and made a Skype video call to BBC News. The call is now the highest Skype call on record, having been made at a height of 8,848 metres above sea level.
Hughes used the HTC flagship smartphone and Skype for Android to make the iconic call. HTC has lately been in the news for unpleasant reasons. Amidst a massive exodus of employees, the company has been struggling for a while to match up with competitor Samsung in markets. The HTC One has reportedly seen around 5 million smartphones being shipped out within the first month of its release. This, however, needs to be compared with the 10 million registered Galaxy S4 smartphones that Samsung was reported to have shipped within a month of its launch. The company has since been positive about its return to the top global smartphone markers charts, estimating that it should get back around 10 to 15 percent of the global smartphone market in the next few years. Be that as it may, the climb to Mount Everest has earned the HTC One a pretty cool badge, at least in our books.
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