Commentaries
Now raising intellectual capital
from The Great Debate:
Can sleeping giant Skype reinvent itself?
-- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
Do once-hot Internet start-ups who miss a date with destiny ever truly get a second chance? History says no, even for once-great names like Netscape, AOL and MySpace.
Skype hopes to be the exception. On Tuesday, a group led by top Internet financiers in Silicon Valley and Europe agreed to pay eBay $1.9 billion in cash for a 65 percent stake in the one-time web calling sensation.
The deal values Skype at a face-saving $2.75 billion, well above the $1.7 billion at which it has been valued on the ecommerce giant's books. Ebay also stands to keep a 35 per cent stake in the company.
But that overlooks the humiliating $1.4 billion eBay has written off on the original deal. Four years ago, eBay promised to pay up to $4.3 billion for Skype, but it later scaled back the total payout. All told, it makes Skype one of the biggest value destroyers of any Internet merger since the last days of the dot.com era.
California hosts garage sale to raise funds
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pulling out all the stops with the state’s “garage sale” of unclaimed or unneeded merchandise. The idea came to him via a “tweet,” he’s using his Hollywood cache to juice bidding and it’s all in the name of belt tightening.
The LA Times has the story:
In his latest effort to balance the budget, the governor is cleaning out the state’s storage sheds and holding a garage sale on Craigslist and EBay.
The European browser elections and other tech news links
Microsoft says the best way to resolve its dispute with European Union competition regulators may be an election. The software giant spelled out late on Friday Brussels time plans for an election-style ballot to decide the question of which browser consumers use in Windows.
The forthcoming Windows 7 operating system would offer a “ballot screen” that lets consumers turn off Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer (IE) and instead use rival browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari Google Chrome or Opera Software.
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The Wall
