The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — joined the Circle Game as channelled by Joni Mitchell and Tom Rush. Google + seems to be a hit, which means it is soon to reach the critical mass where all social software must graduate from high school to beyond. For now, the service appears like a broader reimplementation of Friendfeed, which some of us felt it was truncated not by the users but by the Facebook acquisition. In other words, for some that reinvention is a good thing.
For @borthwick, the project is a substantial undertaking for a company we’ve been trivializing in recent months along with its stock price. For @scobleizer, it means the battle between reach and rich, this time in social circles as Google defines graphs. For @kevinmarks, plenty of work ahead but a strong effort. For @stevegillmor, well, you’ll have to watch the show. But a hint: → Read More
Back in Skype’s early days, it was adding users so fast that it liked to boast that it was “the fastest growing, globally available communications tool in history.” Well, by at least one measure (registered users 9 months after launch), mobile video chat service Tango is outpacing Skype. Tango now has 17 million registered users across both Apple and Android devices, only 9 months after it launched. By comparison, Skype celebrated 9 million users on its first birthday back in 2004.
Today, Skype has more than 600 million registered users, so Tango still has a long way to go. But the company wants to reach 100 million users over the next year. (Don’t we all?). If it does that, it will certainly earn the title of fastest growing communications tool. → Read More
Earlier this week while visiting Seattle, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tipped off Seattle press that the company would be launching an “awesome” new product next week that has been built by Facebook’s Seattle team. The press invitations to that event went out today, saying nothing more than “Please join us for an event at Facebook” on July 6.
So what is the new product? MG Siegler speculates here that it might have a desktop component given all the desktop software hiring going on in Seattle.
And he’s right. This isn’t the main project that team is working on, but next week, says a source with knowledge of the partnership, Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser. Suddenly those chat icons in the invitation have a lot more meaning. → Read More
Thanks to an update of Skype’s Android application, you can now make one-to-one video calls over both WiFi and 3G connections. You can download the Skype app from the Android Market or point your browser to Skype.com/m from your phone.
Note that your smartphone needs to be running Android Version 2.3 (or above) and have a front-facing camera. Supported handsets include the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S. → Read More
The types of technology that a Congressional office can use is severely restricted by the government (as a former Congressional staffer, I am acutely familiar with the strict procurement policy). Today, the U.S. House of Representatives is announcing that members of Congress will be able to use Skype’s videoconferencing technology on government computer systems.
Skype says that its engineers worked closely with the Congressional network security team to ensure that Skype is used safely for official business (and not for Weiner-like conduct). As part of the security precautions, each Congressional office will have access to their own Skype Manager account, so one central person in each office can administer the Skype accounts. → Read More
When an employee cries foul against a big tech company or its greed-driven investors, it’s easy to take the side of the employee, especially when an employee comes forward on the record to state his or her case.
A wronged employee is inherently more sympathetic than a big, greedy private equity firm or a faceless corporation, and it’s rare that an employee will actually publicly take a stand. In the cozy, relationship-driven world of Silicon Valley no one wants to make a public stink about a perceived or even real injustice. The temptation is to just suck it up and move on.
But as this Skype story has continued to dominate another weekend of headlines many bloggers and tweeters are missing important facts in our zeal to defend wronged employees and demand that private equity firms– especially ones profiting off of an $8 billion deal– just do the right thing. → Read More
Skype is being criticized for terminating employees immediately prior to the closing of the Microsoft acquisition, and people are assuming they’re doing this to keep the value of those employees stock options. Skype’s response boils down to saying that the employees were fired because they weren’t good employees, and that the value of the stock is negligible and didn’t affect the decision making process.
Ok. But it gets worse.
Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades. → Read More
Members of Skype’s investor syndicate are adamantly denying the Sunday Bloomberg story that implied that several Skype executives were fired because private equity firm Silver Lake Partners wanted to save a few bucks paying out the proceeds of the Microsoft-Skype deal.
We spoke with one just now who reiterated what other unnamed investors have said in the press this morning: That the decision was 100% new CEO Tony Bates’ call. This investor went further to say that there was absolutely zero board discussion about firing these executives, directly countering Bloomberg’s claim that directors were weighing in on who should be fired.
And here’s the kicker: The executives in question will be receiving 75% of what they would have made off the sale anyway. The remaining 25% is such a small amount of money that it wouldn’t even register on Silver Lake’s radar, this investor said. Or as this person put it more bluntly: “It wouldn’t have been worth the time to make the phone call, not to mention Tony would have told them to fuck off anyway.” → Read More
In October 2010, Skype debuted new Windows software with deep Facebook integration, adding the ability to use the client to monitor your Facebook news feed and post, like or comment on status updates straight from your desktop. This morning, the company (which has been acquired by Microsoft in the meantime) released Skype for Windows 5.5 Beta, which now also lets you have instant messaging conversations with Facebook friends directly from the desktop client. → Read More
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said today that it has approved Microsoft’s $8.5 billion cash takeover of voice and video-over-IP provider Skype. Microsoft officially announced its intent to acquire Skype back on May 10 and, since then, users have been taking to Twitter to blame Microsoft for Skype’s intermittent service. The criticism, at least in that sense, has been a bit preemptive. At least, it seems, until today. Now, with Reuters report that there has been antitrust approval of the deal, users shall soon be able to turn to Microsoft when asking questions of Skype’s sometimes-spotty service. → Read More
Rebtel considers itself to be one of the biggest threats to the Skype empire, so I was interested in learning from the company’s CEO, Andreas Bernstrom, how they felt about Microsoft acquiring their main rival for $8.5 billion in cash.
Unsurprisingly, Bernstrom said the acquisition ‘validated the market’ but he also had some more interesting things to say, mainly about VoIP and mobile telephony in general, and how financially sound the Rebtel business currently is. → Read More
Skype appears to be down, or at the very least it is for a whole lot of users throughout Europe who are tweeting in a ton of different languages about their inability to connect. Many blame Microsoft, and even founder Bill Gates for the downtime, which is sort of strange because the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Skype hasn’t even closed yet.
Anyway, let’s pray that this isn’t a repeat of the Great Skype Outage of December 2010, when the apocalypse appeared nigher than ever. → Read More
Skype is no stranger to patent litigation. One time, even its founders pursued a lawsuit against it. But this is a new lawsuit, not yet reported as far as I can tell. What’s more it was filed in the U.S. on May 10, 2011—the same day that Microsoft announced its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype.
The case is Via Vadis Vs. Skype (embedded below) and was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Via Vadis is a Luxembourg-based company with a license to the patents in question. The patents describe data management systems which break up files for redundancy and distribute them across different “storage units.” The lawsuit claims the patents cover the same technology Skype uses for its “supernodes”—which function as fallback peers in Skype’s peer-to-peer technology. → Read More
Exclusive - Mobile communications startup fring, fresh off the heels of launching group video calls for smartphones, has raised a Series C round of financing from existing investors, TechCrunch has learned.
The amount that was raised is actually not being disclosed, but sources close to the company tell us that fring secured another $10 million in venture capital, bringing its total of funding raised to well north of $30 million. → Read More
The backstory of last year’s film Tron: Legacy picks up where the first film left off. Kevin Flynn teams up with Tron to create a new Grid, one meant for programs and users. But Flynn realizes that he can’t be in the system working on this constructed world all the time, so he creates another program, CLU, to help with the effort. Together, the three of them work on creating this new perfect system.
Then something happens.
I’m reminded of this story when reading Kevin Fox’s post last night entitled: Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers? (MSFT+Skype+Nokia). In it, he lays out a scenario in which Microsoft uses their acquisition of Skype alongside Windows Phone 7 and their new deep partnership with Nokia to disrupt the system that we’ve all been familiar with for far too long: carrier dominance. Their aim is to create a new Grid, if you will. And they’re not alone. Google and Apple are also working on this goal. Flynn. Tron. CLU. → Read More
At 35 thousand feet you can see the future of push notification more clearly. The in-flight WiFi won’t sustain FaceTime or Skype video, but it handles IM just fine. GTalk is buried in the Gmail menus; it has no iPhone or iPad version. Neither Skype nor Facebook Chat have iPad versions, but they do support push notifications through iPhone. Facebook Chat sends push notifications but goes offline after a small interval.
But Skype both supports push notification and maintains a connection. While I type in Pages, I receive pushes in realtime at 35 thousand feet. As John Taschek pushed just now, easily worth $2billion. He pushed not only from his iPad2 but his Droid and PC. Works on the Mac too. While Google times out on its stupid web-only gadget I am multitasking across 3 or 4 OSes, depending on whether you think OS/X is anything more than a deer in iOS’s headlights. This is big news for Microsoft as long as Steve Ballmer can deprecate Windows. → Read More
Exclusive - Earlier this week, Microsoft dropped a bombshell on pretty much the entire technology industry, acquiring VoIP juggernaut Skype for a baffling $8.5 billion in cash.
One side-effect unrevealed up until today: TechCrunch has learned that Skype came extremely close to buying Swedish startup MyWidz right before negotiations with Microsoft were kicked into high gear, freezing said acquisition plans. → Read More
In the wake of today’s news that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, CEOs Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates just held a press conference to explain the deal and sell it to investors. The reaction has ben tepid, with Microsoft shares down about 1 percent so far today. As I’ve pointed out, Skype is a great company, but there are concerns that Microsoft paid too much.
In today’s press conference, Ballmer did a good job couching the deal in terms of Microsoft’s mission to bring people closer together through technology and make their lives better. “We will move beyond email and text to rich experiences. Talking to colleagues across the world will be as seamless as talking to them across the table,” he predicts. → Read More
Microsoft’s purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion in cash is a massive bet for the tech giant.
Although it look like it may well have over-paid by $4.5 billion, and bid against companies who weren’t seriously in the running (Google and Facebook), owning Skype means Microsoft has a much better positioning in mobile.
But that’s not all.
The implications of this deal for Facebook are actually far more interesting. Since Microsoft is an investor in Facebook, the latter will now have deep access to its investor’s assets. → Read More
The deal is done. Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion in cash in its first sizeable acquisition since August 2008, when the Redmond software giant spent $486 million on Greenfield Online.
In fact, this is Microsoft’s biggest financial bet to date in terms of M&A, trumping its $6 billion+ purchase of aQuantive, which dates back to May 2007, in size.
The $8.5 billion question: did Microsoft overpay for Skype? → Read More
