Skype has awarded Jyve the first prize in Skype's hotly-contested first developer competition. More than 100 developers entered the competition, which was open to Skype's thriving community of partners and independent developers.

More than 400 hardware and software products that integrate with Skype's rich features have already been developed by Skype's expanding network of partners.

"I'm thrilled to congratulate Jyve for winning our developer competition," said Niklas Zennstrom, Skype CEO and co-founder. "The competition was fierce and we are so excited by the creativity of the developer community, and can't wait to work more with this ever expanding network of partners. We also want to give special mention to Khaos Labs, Columbus CRM, Iskoot, Audiomatic and SalesForce.com for their outstanding products."

Jyve won the top award of 2,000 Euros for a plugin that lets webmasters enable Skype and call forwarding, presence, browser synchronization and auto-responding features on their sites. Khaos Labs received a special mention for its Free ActiveS COM wrapper, which has been used by numerous other developers to help build a range of Skype Extras, which are readily available for download from the Skype Developer Zone. The Skype's Developers' Competition was launched on April 26.

Skype's APIs have been integrated into a wide range of community, enterprise, entertainment and productivity products, as well as hundreds of hardware products and services. Some of the highlights include:

Hardware - Siemens and RTX cordless phones
Software - such as Skype virtual business cards, ways to listen to your mp3 collections, and personal assistants