Recently eBay reached a settlement with Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The lawsuit, which claimed damages in the amount of $75million each day, resulted from allegations that eBay’s sale of Skype significantly violated a licensing agreement. The settlement has made possible the sale of Skype to an international consortium comprised of three (originally four) investment companies; Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz has gone on record stating all issues have been settled and that the company (Skype) is “free and clear to execute to its full potential”.
GigaOM, a business media company linking the world’s leading technology innovators to a global audience of prospective customers, business partners, and investors, had been spreading rumors that a settlement might be reached earlier in the month and the NY Times came on board later, reinforcing those claims.
Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis, through negotiations and a significant layout of their own personal capital have acquired approximately 14% of Skype (up from an original 10% that was reported earlier), giving them the rights to Global Index P2P technology which is controlled by their company Joltid, and which is key to the success of Skype Software. The two also now have representation at the boardroom.
Index Ventures, one of the original four groups in the new investment entity has backed out of the deal. A spokesperson for the long time investor in Skype issued a statement wherein they said they were happy that the litigation surrounding Skype was behind the company and that they wished Josh Silverman, and all other investors great success. Index Ventures cited “changes in the deal terms” as its chief reason for backing out.
56% of Skype now belongs to the internet consortium, with eBay holding on to 30%, and the original owners of Skype taking their 14%. The deal, which values Skype at $2.75 billion, will be finalized at the end of the fourth quarter of 2009.

Post By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software

In a world where information flows freely at incalculable rates, iPhone users in Germany may soon find themselves in the position of having to pay to read their favorite newspaper via their iPhone. Axel Springer AG, of BILD-Zeitung, states that user’s of the iPhone who wish to read their newspaper will have to purchase and download a new iPhone app. Those who choose not to will find themselves blocked from the newspaper’s website.
The German newspaper giant chose iPhone users as its first target chiefly because studies have shown that users of the iPhone are more willing to pay for applications for their phone than users of other smart phones. That being said, this new pay-per-use policy will be singling out users of the iPhone only for as long as it takes the company to develop applications for other smart phones on the market.
Today BILD-Zeitung’s website Bild.de is the second most visited news site in Germany with nearly 5.6 million users. It is only narrowly trailing Spiegel Online by 20,000 users per day. Half of all mobile users are accessing content on Bild.de via an iPhone, making the pay-per-use plan far from risk-free. Competing newspapers give their products away for free. There is no charge to access content from BILD.de via a laptop computer, and BILD is repeatedly being censured by the German Press Council.
Even BILD CEO Mathias Dopfner agrees that as long as current conditions persist, and mobile users are able to get their news for free elsewhere, his company (theoretically) will lose.
In addition this new plan makes other European newspapers seem far more iPhone friendly. The Guardian, a UK Newspaper, offers a full featured app for the iPhone and a generic smart phone app. The Financial Times also provides their services free of charge to iPhone users. For users who can not get enough news, there is an iPhone app called World Newspapers, which offers free access to 4000 newspapers across 200 countries.
Given that it seems all to easy for iPhone users, and users of smart phones in general, to get their news for free, one must wonder how Axel Springer’s plan has any chance of success.

Post By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software

Have you ever been chatting with a friend on Facebook and had them throw a foreign phrase at you? They’re so smart aren’t they? Well…thanks to Google, you can throw smart right back at them. Firefox v3.5 has teamed up with Google in the area of machine translation. Essentially, you’ll be able to type that foreign phrase into Google’s new toolbar and get an instant translation. Not only that, Google takes it a step further, offering you suggestions of websites and sponsored links it considers relevant to your search.

Google’s new toolbar, which is synced with the Private Browsing mode of Firefox v3.5, will allow you to search without keeping records of your activity. In addition, it disables PageRank, Web History, and Sidewiki.

Google introduced Sidewiki last week, as its newest web annotation system that, coupled with the new translation capability, means more power for web-users who like to voice their opinions. Sidewiki lets web-users comment on whole pages on the web, or on a specific line or more of text, and then share the link to their comment with the world via email, Twitter, Facebook, or any number of other social networking sites. Users will be able to vote up or down on posted comments, and the more up votes a comment receives, the more it is seen. Add the language translation component to Sidewiki, and users are now able to comment on pages that they would have even been able to read previously.

Posted By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software

MySpace, following in the footsteps of rival social networking sight, Face Book, has finally instituted a two-way sync between its site and Twitter. Users of MySpace are now able to update their Twitter status via MySpace and vice versa. This is done through the use of OAuth, an open protocol which allows secure API authorizations between desktop and web applications.

Just as with Face book, users status updates in twitter will show up as “From MySpace”. When users update their twitter status from a mobile device, or from the Twitter website, their update will show in the data stream (blog post) on their MySpace page.

Users have the ability to set whether or not updates are received in either direction or only one way. AOL has also grown fond of tweeting and users of its AIM software are able to update their status both ways.

Many have begun to speculate whether or not the next step will be for MySpace to allow Facebook updates to show up on its site and vice versa. Given the fierce competition between these two social networking sites, I personally believe that it will be some time before we see one site’s logo on the other.

Posted By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software