p2pnet news | Product News:- Just when it seemed eBay’s Skype was going under, Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace may have arrived to save the day.

“In November, MySpace will add the Skype features and brand to its instant-messenger software, which allows MySpace users to conduct text chats with each other. MySpace users who download the newest version of that software will also be able to make free calls from their computers to each other, and to anyone else on the Skype network,” says the New York Times, going on:

“The two companies say they will split the revenue when MySpace members use Skype’s pay features, like voice mail boxes and calling to and from Skype accounts and regular landlines and mobile phones. They have not disclosed the exact ratio of that split.”

“We had to chart [Skype’s] trajectory of growth and how fast that would run, (but) we found out that was a bit front-loaded,” Skype Niklas Zennström told the annual European Technology Roundtable Exhibition (ETRE) conference in Hungary, said Reuters.

“We overshot, in terms of monetization.”

He and partner Janus Friis, co-founders of Kazaa, the P2P application that’s front and centre in the Big Music sue ‘em all file sharing scandals, sold Skype to eBay, becoming billionaires in the process.

But eBay recently announced it had been forced to write-down on the value of the deal.

The news came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, “and it marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago,” said Reuters.

With the two Kazaa founders out of the picture, “The partnership gives Skype increased exposure at a difficult time,” says the NYT, adding:

“EBay recently acknowledged that it overpaid by more than a billion dollars in its $3.1 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005.”

Slashdot it!

Also See:
going under – Is Skype on the skids?, October 13, 2007
New York Times – MySpace and Skype to Announce Partnership, October 17, 2007
Reuters – Skype co-founder says forecasts overshot, October 12, 2007
sue ‘em all file sharing scandals – RIAA accused of ‘Failure to Warn’, October 15, 2007

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