02 October 2007
Caveat emptor. Word is that Microsoft (MSFT) may buy 5% of social
network Facebook for as much as $500 million. And, rumor is that Google
may outbid it.
Ebay just wrote off about $1.4 billion of the $2.6 billion
that it paid for VoIP company Skype. At the time of the purchase, Skype
had about 50 million registered users. By some measurements, that
number is now over 220 million.
Skype never became a big business from a financial standpoint
because users were not willing to pay money for add-ons to their free
VoIP service. Having tens of millions of users meant very little to the
ultimate value of the company. |
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02 October 2007
eBay is cutting more than a third of the price it agreed to pay for Skype VoIP service.
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - EBay Inc said on Monday
it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion
potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling
service Skype two years ago.
The writedown on the value of the deal came as eBay said
Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had resigned
as executives, and marks a tacit admission of lackluster
returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.
EBay said in a U.S. regulatory filing on Monday it would
pay Zennstrom, Friis and other Skype shareholders 375 million
euros ($530 million) and take a charge of $1.4 billion against
eBay's third-quarter results, due out later this month.
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27 September 2007
Digium is stirring up the open-source community it helped create by
buying one of the vendors that has built an IP-PBX on its Asterisk VoIP platform.
Digium Thursday will unveil plans to acquire Switchvox, one of the many
SMB-focused vendors that have cropped up in recent years with products
built on top of Digium's open-source Asterisk VoIP software. Digium is
the primary developer of Asterisk.
"Switchvox gives us a more complete solution that scales to
several hundred users," said Bill Miller, vice president of product
management and marketing at Digium, Huntsville, Ala. "It's a turnkey
solution that doesn't require as much expertise to install. Many
installations are done remotely."
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