eBay To Finally Get Rid Of Skype

Jack Roberts — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:53:48 +0000

Since buying Skype for $2.6bn, plus $530m in performance-based payments, eBay hasn’t found a way to make the free-phone-calls company fit into its world of second-hand tat and anxious bidding. It envisaged a rather hopeful harmony where bidders would use Skype phones to chat to sellers; they clearly preferred the anonymity and passive aggression of email, and eBay was forced to write down its investment by $1.4bn. And now it’s finally decided to part with it, citing “limited synergies”.

It’s going to go under an Initial Public Offering, ie on the stock market, which seems weird considering that the markets’ moods are less predictable than a teenager’s at the moment, and no-one’s been doing any IPOs over the last few months. But the floatation won’t happen until 2010, so it’ll get a headwind of hype and excitement, maybe even a bidding war from buy-out firms prepared to pay over the eventual valuation. Given the popularity already of the Skype iPhone app, we can presume that the brand will be all the stronger come next year. Though Martin Peers at the Wall Street Journal suggests that growth will be limited thanks to calls being free, and that given Skype made $116m profit last year, the $1.7bn that eBay will want for it seems like a lot.

Even if they do get that much for it, it’s still a hefty loss for eBay on their original investment. eBay has also just announced it’s selling back web recommendation service StumbleUpon to its original owners, after they bought it for $75m back in 2007. “We realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses”, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp. So “lack of synergy” seems to be a running theme here – eBay, flush from its brilliant core business, thought it should and could move with the times, or at least be seen to be doing so. But now they’re having to turn back to the auctions, something they should never have strayed from in the first place.

eBay resisted a buyback offer from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who look like an attendee at a caravan trade show and a trance producer respectively; they had pulled together a group of private equity firms to fund the purchase. The Guardian suggests that thanks to a beef over the Global Index technology that the pair licence to Skype, eBay is snubbing Zennstrom and Friis with the IPO. Take that, Scandos!

Maybe Zennstrom and Friis can now concentrate on turning the Joost platform they invested in into a viable TV equivalent of fellow Scandinavian ad-funded success story Spotify. At the moment it’s good for cartoons, the softest of porn, and little else, but surely has the potential to be massive. Maybe they could try and steal the music video market off YouTube while it festers in copyright law hell?

Truffles Shuffle Towards Recession

Jack Roberts — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:17:23 +0000

That totem of culinary showing-off, the white truffle, is being dragged down towards the level of spam fritters by the financial crisis – an auction for this year’s finest specimens saw them going for no more than £20,000 a pop, rather than the record last year of nearly £200,000.

The auction was held in Tokyo last night at a $300-a-head white truffle dinner, with the biggest truffle being bought by Kazumasa Terada, head of Samantha Thavasa (no, us neither). Conspicuous by his absence was Damien Hirst, who, post-diamond skull, was quite the truffle-speculator – maybe he’s still waiting for a certain someone to pony up the dough?

Despite the reluctance to spend six figures on a white fungal blob, the mood in the luxury food market is apparently high. One Dutch luxury cookie manufacturer said of his product: “It’s like wine or champagne, it doesn’t matter what the price is”. Good luck with that philosophy when the recession bites, chum!

In other truffle-based Japanese credit crunch news, it’s been announced that you can buy a truffle-stuffed Christmas chicken, flown from France, for $850. What’s it taste like? ”The meat is not heavy but juicy, and there will be truffles between the flesh and meat, making it very fragrant.” It’s probably delicious, but with a global food crisis on, how can anyone actually enjoying eating something that obnoxiously extravagant?

Bad Idea magazine » auction

eBay To Finally Get Rid Of Skype

Truffles Shuffle Towards Recession