With Microsoft having confirmed its acquisition of Skype, sources tell TechCrunch Europe that Redmond outbid its closest rival, Google, by almost two-to-one. Meanwhile, Facebook is said to have never been in the running.
According to a source who claims knowledge of talks held between all parties, Google came in second at a price of $4B, while Microsoft will be paying $8.5B. This suggests that Redmond is paying significantly over the odds for Skype, although only time will tell if it turns out to be a smart deal. What is known is that had Microsoft been aware of the price that Google was willing to pay it almost certainly would have come in lower. → Read More
The deal buzzards are swirling around Skype, and Microsoft may end up with the prize. Om first reported the rumor, which is now getting major play by the WSJ. Microsoft is in final negotiations to buy Skype for $7 billion, according to the WSJ report. The final price might go closer to $8 billion.
Google and Facebook were also sniffing around Skype, which put off its IPO earlier this year to buy more negotiating time. Microsoft will certainly be overpaying for Skype, which is a better fit for Google or Facebook. But Microsoft is desperate for a legitimate Internet business beyond Bing. → Read More
If you’re the proud owner of a new Skype-enabled 2011 Panasonic Viera television, there’s probably one question that’s been plaguing you: “Where the deuce do I find a decent TV-mountable webcam for this thing?” Well, Logitech makes one — same one they’ve had for six or seven months now — and now it’s specifically compatible with your TVs. Just plug it in and it should go. Same $150 price, same everything otherwise. Congratulations, you can now Skype someone from the comfort of your couch. The nightmare is over! And no, you can’t install the new 1.1 firmware on the old one. Stop trying, you just can’t. → Read More
The news from NBC/Universal/Comcast is that the cable giant has finally made deals with both ABC and Fox to carry selected shows on their on-demand service. This is big news for the iPad set, because all four major broadcast networks are now available in a single service, on the iPad, without Flash.
Across town we hear talk of hardware acceleration linking up with Android to make Flash finally usable on every other device. This would be a good thing for Flash fans, who can make the argument that more devices will work with Flash than won’t. But in the new world of network broadcasting, the show’s over for Flash. Nobody cares what makes the picture dance on the screen, just that it does. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google, BT (Ribbit), the Gillmor Gang, and now salesforce.com. Before, and once the festivities were out of the way, we got back to Gang business, namely the continued aftermath of the phone location recording crisis.
With free lunch debunked, we tackled the Amazon outage and its impact on the Cloud. You can decide for yourselves, but the consensus is that such challenges will be remembered fondly as a validation of the moment, as with the Gmail outage of several years ago, when the Cloud passed from inflection point to basic services. The velocity of business in the iPad age, where CEOs can see deeply into their companies in realtime, demands a level of interactive services and an iterative feedback loop not possible with the previous generation of software. And that lead to a debate about iPhone video calls and what Danny is looking for in a flying car. → Read More
Skype realizes full well its software is used by many school teachers and students from around the globe, and today announced that it has built a dedicated social network to help them connect, collaborate and exchange knowledge and teaching resources over the Web.
This morning, the company launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest. → Read More
As the company prepares for a public offering in the next year, Skype released an updated S-1 filing that includes several new revenue, income and usage numbers. As you may have heard, Skype initially filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company’s newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype “in better shape.”
Skype says that it has grown its average monthly connected users by 38% (to 145 million average monthly connected users) and has grown average monthly paying users by 19%, from the three months ended December 31, 2009 to the three months ended December 31, 2010. Average monthly paying users have increased from 7.3 million to 8.8 million users, and Skype is seeing an average of $97 in revenue per paying user. From December 31, 2009 to December 31, 2010, Skype has grown registered users from 474 million to 663 million users. → Read More
As the company looks to boost revenue in 2011 in advance of an IPO, Skype is pursuing an aggressive enterprise strategy. Today, Skype’s VP of Enterprise, David Gurle, is announcing a strategic partnership with Citrix Online, in which web conferencing software GoToMeeting will be integrated into Skype’s enterprise offering, Skype For Business.
Skype For Business is a paid desktop product that includes capabilities for multi-party video chat, screen sharing and conference calls. But the drawback of the product is that screen sharing cannot take place with multi-party video chat simultaneously. → Read More
Cisco has long dominated the enterprise video conferencing world, but Logitech wants to change that. Logitech currently does video conferencing with their own version called the LifeSize video streaming system. As more and more business profressionals are skipping the airplanes and going for teleconferencing, Logitech sees an opportunity to gain some market share. And due the the large user base of iDevices in business, Logitech is going to support conferencing on iPads and iPhones first. → Read More
Sometimes using Skype can be a challenge — no cell data and secured WiFi doesn’t help. Skype hopes to change that. They just announced at MWC they are expanding their Skype Access by partnering with eight international WiFi operators: → Read More
For Skype, 2011 is undoubtedly going to be a pivotal year. The VoIP giant is preparing to go public, and armed with a new CEO, Skype is looking to add new products for both its consumer and enterprise businesses and boost revenue. Already, Skype launched video chat capability to its iPhone app, acquired mobile streaming startup Qik, and launched paid group video functionality to its enterprise offerings. While we’ve heard about the company’s enterprise strategy, we have not yet uncovered the details of Skype’s long-term consumer strategy. Skype GM of Consumer Neil Stevens spoke to TechCrunch about the VoIP company’s goals when it comes to expanding its consumer user base, product roadmap and revenue plans.
When asked what the most important product strategy is for Skype in 2011, Stevens was quick to reply that video, especially on mobile devices, is going to be a significant area of development for the company. At any given time Skype now has 28 million simultaneous users (which is up from 27 million reported in early January), with 42 percent of these users engaging in video calls. While Skype has video functionality on its Windows, Mac and now iPhone clients, there is still much more to come in 2011 says Stevens. → Read More
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Skype’s IPO is being pushed back to the second half of 2011. Last August, Skype filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company’s newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype “in better shape.”
From the Wall Street Journal report: “Tony needs to get his feet underneath him and understand the business and the voice of the company,” another person familiar with the matter said. “The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go.” The additional time may help Mr. Bates to get Skype in better shape and increase its value ahead of an offering. But there is also the risk the IPO market weakens, hurting Skype’s chance to go public or depressing the value of the company. → Read More
Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that it would be blocking the Skype toolbar add-on in all versions of its Firefox browser.
While this concerns an impending ‘soft block’, meaning users will be able to re-enable the add-on if they choose to do so, Skype is keen to point out users should always install the most recent version of its desktop client in order to avoid compatibility issues. → Read More
It’s been a big week for Skype. The company launched video chat capability to its iPhone app last week and announced the acquisition of mobile video startup Qik today. The company has made another announcement, launching group calling functionality to its business offering for Windows PCs (the feature had previously been added to its consumer clients for Mac and Windows computers last year).
The new version of Skype for enterprise allows businesses to have video calls with up to 10 concurrent participants, adding to the client’s existing chat, screen sharing and conference call features. Group Video Calling for businesses is available from Skype for $8.99 per user per month. → Read More
It looks like Skype has just picked up mobile video startup Qik. According to a release, Skype has entered an agreement to buy the startup. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but sources tell Business Insider that deal was around $150 million. We’ve embedded the release below.
At last count, Qik, which enables mobile phones users to record and stream videos in realtime, has 5 million users. → Read More
We’ve been hearing reports that Skype is debuting a mobile video chat service and D-Day has arrived. The company is launching a brand new version of its iPhone app that includes the ability to turn on video in any Skype chat.
The beauty of the app is that it brings free video calling to iPhone 3G devices, iPad and iPod Touch, all of which couldn’t run Apple’s video calling feature Facetime (the feature only works with iPhone 4 devices and Mac computers). Of course, iPad owners won’t be able to initiate a video call, but these users can receive any video chats from contacts. → Read More
After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong.
One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152). → Read More
Poor Skype. A mere day after its key consumer service suffered a major outage, affecting tens of millions of users for hours on end, a patent infringement lawsuit against the company was filed in the United States. Plaintiff is the obscure Gradient Enterprises, a non-practicing entity (also lovingly known as an “obnoxious patent troll” in some parts).
The patent-in-suit is U.S. patent no. 7,669,207, entitled “METHOD FOR DETECTING, REPORTING AND RESPONDING TO NETWORK NODE-LEVEL EVENTS AND A SYSTEM THEREOF”. → Read More
Skype is still recovering from its massive outage yesterday, but it is getting back to normal. Instant messages still seem to have a delay (anecdotally, I am noticing that I hear the IM ping, but then it is hit or miss whether any message comes through), but voice calls are working fine. I know because I just spoke with CEO Tony Bates over Skype. He estimates that between 16 million and 17 million Skype users, or about 80 percent of the people who would be on the service right now, can use it. “We are bringing folks back on in a controlled manner,” he says.
Bates priority is to get the service back up and running and to make sure Skype does not lose the trust of its users. To rectify that, he is publicly apologizing to them for the downtime and will offer users some sort of credits, with more details on that coming out later today. (Yes, free calls!) This is the right approach, and reminds me of what Netflix does when its streaming movie service goes down (free movies). → Read More
Skype users has been experiencing a lot of connection problems in the past day or so, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. The service is now slowly crawling back into the land of the living.
The Skype team has been doing a pretty good job keeping people informed about the problems, although they’ve been unable to say when service will be restored for everyone.
The company has just announced that an estimated 10 million people are now back online, although they’re unable to obtain an exact figure because of the way the software works. → Read More
