eBay Inc. has agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA, the global Internet communications company, for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration. Here’s the rest of the release: The acquisition will strengthen eBay’s global marketplace and payments platform, while opening several new lines of business and creating significant… Read More »
Skype has lowered rates of its SkypeOut service to some destinations as part of its first anniversary celebrations. Here are the details: Six major new countries have been added to the SkypeOut Global Rate, a fixed, low-cost rate of 1.7 Euro cents per minute to popular calling destinations. China, Greece, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Poland and… Read More »
Claria, formerly Gator and allegedly the brief focus of Microsoft interest, has announced it is working on a new search engine technology which “goes far beyond analyzing links to pages and hypertext matching, and instead evaluates how consumers actually interact with search results when they are seeking information on the Web”. I don’t claim to… Read More »
Trying to make some sense of the announcement (PDF) last week by Britain’s secretive National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC) that Parts of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) are being targeted by an ongoing series of email-borne electronic attacks. While the majority of the observed attacks have been against central Government, other UK organisations,… Read More »
Nicholas Kristof did a great piece in yesterday’s NYT on blogging in China and its impact — death by a thousand blogs — on the government. But what’s particularly impressive is the multimedia package he’s put together for the piece. Check out the link on the left hand side of the page. It includes websites,… Read More »