Source: www.theregister.co.uk

eBay has dispatched one of its own to take the helm at Skype, in the hope he can go some way to justify its increasingly baffling multi-billion quid purchase of the profit-lite VoIP app.

Josh Silverman, current CEO of eBay price comparison tentacle Shopping.com, will take over on 24 March. In his inaugural blog post, he writes: "Skype is one of the defining internet technologies of our era… it’s changing the world. You don’t look forward to something like that. You drop what you’re doing and jump aboard."

Skype certainly is one of the defining internet technologies of our era. It was over-hyped, overvalued and has no discernable business plan, other than to recruit more free users.

The number of Skype users continues to grow, but is not reflected in an increase in revenues for eBay in advertising or ecommerce. It makes the $2.6bn soon-to-depart eBay CEO Meg Whitman gambled on P2P VoIP look like a bad bid.

In fact, Silverman’s task is enormous. The auction house is facing investor calls to cut its losses - a $1.4bn write down last year - and offload the service.

Skype’s founders Nikolas Zennstrom and Janus Friis apparently appreciated the merits of such a strategy when they trousered $530m - a third of their projected take if Skype had been a winner for eBay. ®

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Google has a new dig, Googletalk and eBay that is. They have signed an agreement around text-based advertising and "click-to-call" advertising. Googletalk and skype will provide the voice and eBay will produce the goods!, literally.

According to the press release, agreement includes the following;
Search and Advertising on eBay Sites Outside the U.S.
Google will become the exclusive provider of text-based advertising on eBay outside the United States. This agreement provides Google advertisers access to one of the internet’s most robust online communities while enhancing the shopping experience for eBay buyers by making it easier for them to find the products they seek.

"Click-to-Call" Advertising and Technology Integration
Google and eBay also plan to integrate and launch "click-to-call" advertising functionality within eBay’s U.S. and international marketplaces and Google’s search platform. The click-to-call capability will allow a user to click on a link or icon within a product or service advertisement to initiate an Internet voice call to participating eBay merchants or Google advertisers directly from either company’s respective sites, using Skype or Google Talk.
You can find the full text press release here.
What made me laugh is a portion of the press release;
"Click-to-call advertising is an emerging e-commerce model that brings buyers and sellers together by opening up new ways for advertisers and merchants to generate customer leads using the Internet." We were developing this in 2002. One way or the other, this is good news for All of us, Good communication between all of us.