by alec on September 1, 2009
The rumours have been flying for a week or so that Skype was to be sold. Yesterday the rumour became fact, as eBay unloaded a 65% stake in Skype to a consortium of investors, including some of the original Skype investors like Index Ventures. eBay gets to keep a 35% stake in Skype, and gets out of what was arguably a bad marriage from the beginning. Skype, on a path to do a cool billion in sales next year, gets to be an independent entity once more.
So why now? Why not just wait it out until next year when the prospects of a Skype IPO might be better, and shoot for a public offering?
It’s all about risk mitigation. Skype’s IPO could have been torpedoed by any number of factors including a downturn in the market, the failure to resolve the JoltID licensing dispute with Skype co-founders Zennstrom and Kase, or even the remote possibility of a new competitor devaluing Skype. eBay’s management prudently took $2.1 billion off the table, but preserved their ability to participate in the upside of an IPO.
Should eBay shareholders be angry? Perhaps some will be. The more risk averse, however, are surely relieved.
by alec on September 1, 2009
What would the world look like if cellular networks were open-sourced? That’s the question that the OpenBTS project is attempting to answer by building a GSM base station from open source components like Asterisk. To highlight how the OpenBTS team believes that this technology will be used, this week they’ve set up a pilot with Belgium’s Voxbone to provide mobile text and voice service at the Burning Man Festival, out in the middle of the desert, far from today’s mobile networks.
At Burning Man, mobile users can simply register their phones and begin receiving text messages, and voice calls from people anywhere on the planet via VoxBone’s iNum service and any carrier that supports iNum. Practically speaking, that means if you want to call someone at Burning Man, you’re likely going to do it via a VoIP client on a PC such as GoogleTalk. The recipient, however, will receive the call via their mobile phone in a region where there is actually no mobile service from any commercial carrier. The service is being provided by a mixture of low cost hardware and open source software that the OpenBTS team has set up on site.
Why do this? Naturally it’s a nice showcase for VoxBone’s iNum technology. More to the point, OpenBTS believes that by making inexpensive mobile base stations available built around open source solutions, telephone service can be made affordable even in the remotest parts of the world.
More details in this FAQ.
