Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Skype to IPO; anticipation and unanswered questions

by alec on April 14, 2009

It should have been obvious.

With all of the rumours flying that Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis were apparently trying to buy Skype back, eBay has chosen to IPO Skype instead. After all, with 2008 revenues of $550 million, and projections of $1 billion by 2011, if there was ever a business that deserved an IPO, Skype would be it.

As Andy Abramson points out, however, there are still many unanswered questions, most notably the JoltID license. Now that the license from Zennström and Friis has apparently been terminated they will have to strike a deal before an IPO. And how about the patents that are preventing Skype for iPhone from being distributed in Canada?

A massive Skype IPO would be just the thing to electrify financial markets, and bring tech stocks back with a roar. Could Skype have the same impact on financial markets as Netscape with their massive IPO in the 1990’s? We can only hope.

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The cloud in your hand

by alec on April 14, 2009

Stacey Higginbotham’s piece on Cloud Computing emphasizes how Google is blurring the boundaries between the Cloud and local computing. The example given is GMail running on iPhone or Android, and how Google is using Webkit browsers to make the app behave as if it were running on the web.

Last night, as I left my office, a young guy from a neighboring business flagged me down and asked if he could use my phone. He had locked himself out of his office, and his keys, phone, and wallet were all inside. I handed him my N95, but he couldn’t reach anyone who’s phone number he could remember. “If only I had access to the internet”, he said. “Oh… try this”, and I handed him my iPhone.

What happened next was pretty interesting. He had never used an iPhone, and I had never used GMail on iPhone. He logged into GMail, selected the Google Docs tab, and browsed his company directory (stored in a spreadsheet), clicking on various phone numbers until he found one that answered.

It was a remarkable demonstration of Stacey’s point – that the Webkit technologies that Google is exploiting in their apps really are delivering you the internet in the palm of your hand, and blurring the difference between cloud and local computing very convincingly.

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Microsoft and search

April 14, 2009

Go read Ina Fried’s interview with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi about the company’s efforts to break into search. What you’ll see is classic Microsoft. The company is breaking down the problems it faces with search and taking apart each problem individually. Need more people using search? Reward them with cash back when they make purchases. Notice [...]

Read the full article →