Kim Dotcom launches public beta of “Skype killer” MegaChat

German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur, businessman, and political party founder (New Zealand's Internet Party) Kim Dotcom's encrypted audio and video calling service has finally arrived, mobile and technology website bgr.com reported.

Dotcom (Born Kim Schmitz) and the Mega Conspiracy Team announced yesterday that MegaChat had officially entered public beta, and users would be able to place video calls and share files with their contacts over a secure line.

Dotcom said the beta would have a phased release. Video calling had already been implemented into the service, while text chat and video conferencing would come soon. Even with a limited feature set, Dotcom said users had already placed in excess of 500,000 calls in the hours since the service went live.

The reason for using the ''Skype killer'' (as Dotcom calls it) over Skype itself would be the  privacy it offered and in order to ensure that the service was as secure as possible, Dotcom had a reward for anyone who found a security flaw during the public beta.

Another reason MegaChat would appeal to users was one did not have to install anything in order to use it. Once users signed up for an account on the Mega website, they could simply begin adding contacts and then place calls over one's browser.

Dotcom who is very optimistic about the impending success of MegaChat, tweeted yesterday, that Mega currently had 15 million users, but predicted that ''MegaChat could elevate us to 100+ million users by the end of 2015.''

The new MegaChat currently supports only voice and video calling but text chat and video conferencing would soon be added, Mega founder Kim Dotcom said on Twitter, PC World reported.

The service which runs inside web browsers, not through a dedicated application, is free to use. It could be launched from the mega.nz website with a click on the new ''Conversations'' button in the left-side toolbar after logging in.

Perhaps the most important feature of the service was, its use of end-to-end encryption as claimed by the company. This meant that Mega should not have access to users' encryption keys and should not be able to decrypt communications.

Dotcom said in December at the time he revealed plans to launch the service that no US based online service provider could be trusted with user data. He added, they needed to provide the US government with backdoors as he positioned MegaChat as a Skype alternative.