Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

According to the Times Auntie Meg finally bowed to reality. eBay, which paid $2.6b for Skype in 2005, has taken a $1.43b charge and (tacitly) acknowledged that it overpaid for what is essentially a tool for extremely price-sensitive young people to call each other for free.

At the time, many of us wondered why an auctions company was buying an IP telephony business. There was some unconvincing mumbling about letting buyers and seller communicate, which the Times describes as having an effect which is "impossible to measure" - in other words, non-existant.

It had to be absolutely painful for Ms. Whitman to write the final earn-out $570m check to Niklas Zennstrom as he stepped down from the CEO role. Ouch.

Labels: eBay, Skype

Blodget has an interesting commentary on eBay's launch of Kijiji in the States this week. His argument is that at least eBay is finally doing something that is about getting people to buy and sell things, instead of messing around with VOIP. My argument is that they should have done this 5 years ago, since the site could have been built for $100k.

Labels: Blodget, eBay, Kijiji