eBay to spin off Skype with IPO in 2010
In the release, eBay CEO John Donahoe admits something that most of us have known since eBay first purchsed Skype for around $3 billion: "Skyper has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal." By separating Skype from eBay and running it as its own publicly traded company, Skype can do what's best for a VoIP company and not have to worry about being attached to an online auction house.
Skype generated $551 million in revenue in 2008, and had 405 million registered users.
[via Techmeme]
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
KarlW said 7:41AM on 4-15-2009
If Skype's revenue is growing as fast as they say it is:
- Costs are growing even faster, making the business unprofitable or raising questions on the sustainability of profitability
- Or they're idiots and are going to sell a thriving profitable business when it could quite easily be left alone under its own management team as it is now. $1Bn in revenue for an online service with relatively low costs is pretty darn good.
Perhaps they're just making it a subsidiary. That makes little sense if the business is as thriving as eBay say it is, but is sensible if there are doubts and they want to isolate themselves from the fallout as much as possible.
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