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?

As well as being effectively able to hit “Buy It Now” thanks to her position as the world’s 897th billionaire, her political credentials have been building ever since she stepped down as CEO of eBay in March last year. She backed the handsomely plastic-looking Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign train last year, before neatly hopping aboard McCain’s once he became the Republican candidate; McCain said she could be a future Treasury Secretary during the presidential debates last year: “She knows what it’s like to be out there in the marketplace. She knows how to create jobs”. Sorry John, but getting America to sell up all that crap they’ve got in the loft isn’t exactly the long-term fiscal stimulus that’s needed.

Whitman held the CEO post at eBay for 10 years, starting out when there were just 30 employees. In that time, she achieved a staggering amount – took the number of employees to 15,500; bought Skype, PayPal, Shopping.com, Gumtree and a quarter of Craigslist; moved into China via a deal with Chinese internet provider Tom; got it to where it’s turning over $8.46bn a year. Shame the whole Skype thing didn’t really pan out though.

She’s toothy and cosy-looking with an edge of pure steel, like Cilla Black crossed with Margaret Thatcher, and is married to a brain surgeon called Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV (yikes!). She looked after Mr Potato Head for a while, but she loses nice-points thanks to her support for the ban on gay marriage that got passed in California last year, which pretty much rules out the pink vote come 2010. Another thorn in her side is Thomas Hall, who sneakily bought up domain names like whitman2010.com; Whitman’s team spent loads of money trying to get them back and has thus far failed. I’m sure she’ll still be able to come up with something catchy though. After all, eBay was going to be called Echobay before some mining company stopped them. Go for two syllables at most Meg – WhitGov, GovWhit, something like that.