Sky-pe Ohh no!

[gameboy]

In the Guardian today, Mr Murdoch has said that News Corp (Sky owners) are prepaired to spend up to £1 billion to increase it's Internet presence.

He said the company would never rival Google but could be more like Yahoo.

He said the company had had 'friendly' talks with Skype.

Ohh no that has to be bad news. Skype!

P.S. News Corps profit were up from $1.5 billion last year to $2.1 billion this year.

The company ended the year with $6 billion in cash - half will be used to buy back shares some of the rest for acquisition.
How much do you want for Satellites.co.uk Chris? He may be interested!

 

[rolfw]

Would be interesting to see what affect that would have.

 

[Analoguesat]

Would be interesting to see what affect that would have.

You get a release of buggy s/w which deletes all your favourite contacts if you have more then 30 loaded ;)

 

[PaulR]

And unless you keep up your monthly payments won't do f@*k all...

PaulR

 

[gameboy]

More news on Media Corps Internet stake...

News Corp. is in talks to buy a stake in an unnamed search engine as part of its plan to create a major portal and expand on the Internet, Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said this week.

"We are in advanced negotiations to buy a controlling interest in what we think is a wonderful search engine" but that has an "insignificant price," Murdoch said during an earnings conference call with analysts on Wednesday.

The company is embarking on a major expansion on the Internet aimed at coalescing its online properties around a main portal based on the assets of Fox Interactive Media, he said. Of the Internet expansion, Murdoch said, "There is no greater priority for the company today."

News Corp. has planned to spend about $2 billion on Internet acquisitions, including the $580 million it agreed to pay to buy Intermix Media, which owns MySpace.com, and $60 million it is paying for sports Web site owner Scout Media, according to Murdoch.

Murdoch said he doesn't see the future News Corp. portal competing much with search giant Google, and that it's more likely to compete with Yahoo, "although I don't see why we can't live side by side with them," he added.

America Online also is in the process of reinventing itself as a free portal, opening up its Time Warner content that was previously walled off to subscribers and banking on the surging demand for broadband access.

Source: CNet

 

[Channel Hopper]

Murdoch said he doesn't see the future News Corp. portal competing much with search giant Google, and that it's more likely to compete with Yahoo, "although I don't see why we can't live side by side with them," he added.

Recollections of BSB ?

 

[gameboy]

News Corp. buy Blinkx

Media giant News Corp. is apparently talking to video search company Blinkx about an acquisition, according to a news report. With $2 billion allotted for Internet acquisitions, News Corp. plans to challenge Yahoo, MSN and others with a digital network of its own, the company's CEO Rupert Murdoch indicated last week during an earnings announcement.

To that end, News Corp., which owns Fox News and Fox Sports, recently bought the parent company of social networking site MySpace.com and sports Web site Scout Media Inc. for a combined $700 million.

Blinkx, a pioneering video search engine that arguably outdoes offerings from Google and Yahoo, could be the glue that ties together News Corp.'s online network of the future, which will likely be tailored to a broadband, video-rich Internet. Yahoo's already headed that direction, with a content-production team in Hollywood and video search tools in the making.

If the Blinkx acquisition happens, it will raise an interesting question. How unbiased will a corporate-owned search tool be in delivering the video content of third parties over its own?

News Corp. and Blinkx didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Source: CNet

 

[gameboy]

Internet telephony operator Skype has tens of millions of users but envisions attracting billions with the help of video phones, says the man who co-founded the company.
Niklas Zennstrom, who also serves as the company's CEO, demonstrated a beta video version of Skype during his keynote at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University. The application is a plug-in based on Skype's core telecommunications technology and is being tested internally. Speaking from his office in Estonia, the executive did not say when the product would be ready for release.

Flanked by Tim Draper of investment firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Skype's largest investor, to the tune of $10 million), Zennstrom said his goal is to use innovations from developers and outside partners to help build his business to a level that could rival Google and Yahoo.

"We are trying to create an ecosystem and extend our network...and we are focused on developing our products and extending our APIs (application user interfaces) so we can be bigger than we could be by ourselves," Zennstrom said, declining to respond to speculation that Yahoo is trying to buy his company. Skype's annual revenue has not been disclosed, but analysts suggest the valuation of the company could be in the $6 billion to $10 billion range.

So far, Skype has been successful with an affiliate program that allows companies and small Web site owners to co-brand the Skype service. So far, sites in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and some European countries are onboard.

Zennstrom also noted that his company's partnerships with hardware manufacturers, including Motorola and Siemens, would help increase Skype's user base. So far, Palm OS-based smart phones were not being considered, Zennstrom said, because the operating system wasn't that great for voice processing.

At one point, Zennstrom affirmed claims that Skype software uses some of the computing resources and available bandwidth on a connected PC to create super groupings of network identities or nodes without user permission. The executive explained that any such practice helped the software better locate a Skype user on the network.

"If I can share my computer resources and not pay my phone bill, some people think that is a good thing," he said.

Video VoIP still far away
Video telephony has perennially been the "next year" application for leading providers of Internet telephony, meaning they've all said it's coming but have yet to introduce the services. In the U.S., video telephony is available from Packet8, a Silicon Valley-based Net phone operator. Meanwhile, gear makers Cisco Systems, Avaya and others are trying to develop ways to lower the costs of videophones, which are considered too high for most consumers.

Analysts believe businesses will be the first adopters of video telephony, mainly as a way to cut down on travel costs associated with in-person meetings. Consumers are less likely to adopt such a service until the price of phones drops to affordable levels--below $100 each, analysts say.

Considering that Skype's telephony software has been downloaded more than 132 million times, and has up to 3 million simultaneous users at any time of day, Skype's entry into the video phone application game is sure to boost the industry's chances.

But it remains to be seen whether Skype customers are willing to buy video phones or pay for any new videophone software the operator is going to release. That's because Skype's is mostly a free service if the calls are made between Internet-connected PCs, although it does offer premium services such as SkypeOut, which lets users make calls from their PC to traditional phones for about two cents a minute. So far, SkypeOut has about 1.1 million customers, which Skype says allows it to lay claim to the title of largest commercial VoIP operator.

Draper, who helped fund cutting-edge companies such as online e-mail provider Hotmail and Internet advertising software firm Overture, affirmed that he and Zennstrom would like to keep Skype a private company. The investment banker said that Skype wouldn't even consider being acquired for less than $1 billion. (that's all News Corp had to invest and they've spent some!)

Source: CNET

 

[gameboy]

Ebay to buy Skype for £1.4 billion...

Full story...

 

[Channel Hopper]

Ive just had my marching orders from eBay after their sister company Paypal made some cock up over money transfers, then attempted to cover it up with an 'anti money laundering scheme' in the hope I would give them new bank account details to back up the Paypal account.

Be very careful when you are asked to give further details to Paypal for payments, the Financial Ombudsman is now checking on the legal aspect of their interpretation of the guidelines.

I have no doubt eBay has the money (probably a weeks wages) to buy skype. It will be sad to see it get swallowed up and regurgitated into a shadow of its former self.

 

[gameboy]

Rather long story on the eBay Skype takeover...

Since when was anything free from eBay?

Will you need an account to use it?

This maybe an opportunity for one of the other players to take over the lead in VOIP... only time will tell.

 

[gameboy]

eBay plans to pay $370 million for an online payments service operated by VeriSign, as part of a broader agreement between the two companies, the auction giant said Monday.

According to the two companies, VeriSign's payment gateway business, which allows small businesses to accept credit card and other payment types online, processed more than $40 billion in customer transactions last year. eBay sees the service as a way to expand its own PayPal transactions division to a new category of small- and medium-size business customers.

The VeriSign service "perfectly complements PayPal's existing payment services," PayPal President Jeff Jordan said in a statement. "This acquisition allows PayPal to give our customers more choice in payment services and grow our merchant services business even more quickly."

The deal is one portion of a multipart agreement between the two companies. The pact will also see eBay tap VeriSign for a wider range of digital security protections.

Under the terms of the agreement, eBay will adopt a new kind of transaction protection from VeriSign that will give customers one-time passwords or digital certificates, guarding against identity theft. The new program will begin sometime next year.

eBay said that the VeriSign transaction service business will likely generate about $100 million in revenue for the company in 2006. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Source: CNet

 

[gameboy]

Skype, the international Web calling phenomenon acquired by eBay Inc., said on Thursday it is adding high-resolution video picture phone features to its free telephone replacement service.

Version 2.0 of the Skype software at http://www.skype.com aims to make it easier for customers to sign up and use its phone-over-Internet services, which are free on computers and offer low per-minute charges when calling conventional phones.

Maker of Web blog software based in San Francisco, has agreed to embed links to Skype as an option for millions of users of its Typepad blog service, the two companies said.

The new Skype software also will allow users of the popular Microsoft Outlook e-mail management software to install a browser-based toolbar that offers instant links to Skype and notifications when other Skype users are online.

"Video calling has come of age," Skype vice president of marketing Saul Klein said of the new feature.

The deal with Six Apart will enable Web users to place instant Web-based phone calls to bloggers via Skype, further enhancing the two-way nature of blog communications.

The option of adding Skype will be available early next year on Typepad, and eventually on Live Journal, a second blogging service from Six Apart with which nearly 9 million blogs have been created, the companies said in a statement.

"This allows you to see a button on a blog and start talking to the person who publishes that blog," Mena Trott, co-founder and president of Six Apart, said in a phone interview. "That is the next step in blogging."

Logitech and Creative, which collectively sell around two-thirds of the world's webcams -- the miniature cameras used for video conferencing via computer -- have agreed to distribution partnerships with Skype. For quality video calls, users need to use a broadband connection.

Skype's long-rumored upgrade to video phone calling capabilities competes with computer instant messaging services that also offer video phone calling features, including Microsoft MSN and America Online's AIM service.

The upgraded Skype software also features "mood indicator" software that allows users to let their contacts signal whether they are happy, sad, listening to music, available or busy and other phone personalization features.

These include ring tones to alert Skype users to callers and customizable personal images, known as avatars, for which users will pay around $1 a piece. Among the companies supplying avatars are American Greetings and U.K.-based Weemees.

Skype and Logitech plan to jointly market Skype Video and Logitech webcams and telephone headsets worldwide, engaging in regional promotions and direct outreach to Logitech customers and Skype users, Logitech said in a separate statement.

 

[rolfw]

Just downloaded the Skype 2.0.0.43 Beta and reinstalled my webcam, so will give it a try, not so sure about the blog version though, or having everybody and his dog ringing for a video chat.

 

[Channel Hopper]

or having everybody and his dog ringing for a video chat.

I just knew the next thing from Skype would be DTH mature content.

 

[Topper]

, or having everybody and his dog ringing for a video chat.

And you would be able to see she was a dog uggh

 

[Lancelot]

Can't get the blasted thing to work at all !!
Just keeps locking the computer on webcam test, and then won't shut down at all. Happens with both the webcam and an analogue video camera I've been trying.

Never would have been like this if rupie had got in there first


L.

 

[rolfw]

Worked first time for me, did have problems with installing the webcam, but that had nothing to do with Skype, more to do with me putting in the wrong drivers.

Will say though, that it isn't happy with 256K upline speed, I reckon it needs half a meg.

 

[Lancelot]

Gone back to 1.4 for the minute, now I have a working mike it's not so bad.
ISP is currently free 8 megging everyone so by the time that kicks in the 2.0 beta should be ironed out.


L.

 

[PaulR]

And you would be able to see she was a dog

Hey, heeeeyyyy

Don't you know..

On the Internet no-one knows you're a dog?