Looks like Ebay won’t be tying Skype into their site – ever. I remember when they purchased Skype some time ago and also remember it being a bit of a strange buy in my mind. But I was willing to keep an eye on things and see what genius they had in store for us. To me it really feels like both Ebay and Skype have been stagnant for quite some time. I don’t know many people who run to Ebay anymore to buy a new gadget or find a deal on something. It is definitely not the buzz it once was unless you are looking for cell phone accessories. I am still not sure how anyone makes money off those insane prices.

I have read a couple of articles on this and from what they are saying, they sold for 2.75 billion which means they only lost ~$300+ on the deal. Not too bad according to those same articles. Can I have some of that please? I have a mortgage I would love to pay off :)

This is some of what wired.com had to say about the deal:

But the underlying technology has been widely accepted and is no longer a geeky novelty. Skype is now the largest provider of international calls in the world. It has apps for the Blackberry and iPhone, and the world’s largest handset maker, Nokia, announced in February that it would preload Skype software into some of its new smartphones starting from the third quarter of this year. And in March Skype made a bid to enter the enterprise space with “Skype for Sip.”

So an interesting turn of events for something that still feels like a geeky novelty for me. I think that it is mostly to do with the fact that North Americans don’t need the service as much as the rest of the world unless you are calling the somewhere out there. Americans and Canadians benifit from pretty cheap phone service and so the people I know who use it are Europeans who have family still in their home country.

That being said – I hope we don’t lose Skype due to financial problems. We need someone to keep our phone companies in check and services such as these that are free will do just that.

Geek on!