To celebrate the Chinese New Year, Skype is encouraging you to call anyone in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. You might want to do this because Skype is giving away 24 free minutes of SkypeOut time. You don't have to use your minutes to call those countries, but Skype isn't so much giving away 24 free minutes as giving you 50 cents of SkypeOut credit to spend any way you like.

Therefore 50 cents will buy you 24 minutes of talk time within the U.S. and Canada, or 24 minutes of talk time if you want to call someone in China or Hong Kong, but you'll get about 30 seconds of talk time if you decide to call Cuba.

written by Robert M.