Google/Skype Acquisition or Partnership Imminent?

From Tech Crunch - Something big is brewing between Google and Ebay’s Skype, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Actually, for weeks now there have been low level rumors of the two companies talking, but nailing down any details was difficult. New information, however, suggests that they are in current talks and that a partnership or outright acquisition may be announced in the near future.

Skype, acquired in late 2005 for $3.1 billion, has been a financial albatross around Ebay’s neck. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

It’s clear that eBay wants to either unload Skype, or significantly drive performance. | Read full article

Skype blames Windows for outage

From The Globe And Mail - At last, the folks at Skype have provided us with a half-decent explanation of what happened when the peer-to-peer telephone service went dark for almost two full days last week. Unfortunately for Skype, it's not a very favourable one. The company does its best to blame the service outage on Microsoft, saying the disruption was triggered by a massive wave of restarts by users whose computers had downloaded routine updates from Microsoft:

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," says a post on the company's blog. "The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources." | Read full article

Error in Skype’s Software Shuts Down Phone Service

Editor's note - Yikes! This is not good for those of us who use and depend on Skype.

From The New York Times - The online telephone service Skype was not working for much of the day on Thursday, leaving its 220 million users, some of them small businesses that had given up their landlines, without a way to call colleagues, customers and friends.

Executives at Skype, a division of eBay that is based in Luxembourg, said its engineers worked throughout the day to bring the service back online. But they said that while they had pinpointed the source of the problem, they still did not know why it had resulted in a network failure, and they could not ensure that the service would be running smoothly again by Friday. | Read full article

Analyzing Skype's Q2, Updated Financial Model

From Internet Outsider - In my opinion, Skype has lost focus, allowing other companies to capture markets it should have owned (Google's new acquisition Grand Central, for example). Skype has yet to roll out a satisfactory small-business solution (main number, PBX, extensions, etc.) and has yet to penetrate the much larger phone-to-phone market. Skype's forays into community and commerce, meanwhile, smack of the core expertise of its parent, eBay, which has no strategic reason for owning the company. eBay should sell Skype to Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google, and focus on its core commerce business. | Read full article

SunRocket Users May Lose Service and Payments

From The New York Times - Telephone service could be lost for more than 200,000 customers of SunRocket, an Internet telephone company that said on Tuesday that it had gone out of business, according to a person involved in its liquidation.

The customers also could lose money paid in advance to SunRocket, which offered unlimited telephone service for a year for an upfront payment of $199, said Martin D. Pichinson, co-founder of Sherwood Partners, which signed a contract on Tuesday to handle the distribution of assets to creditors.

Mr. Pichinson said the first priority would be to make sure customers were made whole, by moving their phone lines to other providers. But he said that negotiations with other providers had not yet borne fruit. | Read full article

Related article: Internet Phone Company Halts Operations

Internet Phone Company Halts Operations

From The New York Times - SunRocket, one of the largest start-up companies offering Internet phone service, has ceased operation and is moving its customers to one or more other companies, a person briefed on its status said yesterday.

A message on SunRocket’s customer service line said the company was “no longer taking customer service or sales calls.” Executives of SunRocket, which is based in Vienna, Va., and had 200,000 subscribers as of April, could not be reached for comment.

The development underlined the struggles of start-ups trying to make a business out of providing Internet-based phone service, telecommunications industry analysts said. | Read full article