p2pnet news view | Off Topic:- eBay is stumbling badly with its investments.

The online auction site to end all online auction sites (including itself, if it doesn’t wake up soon) blew $2.6 billion on Skype in 2005.

Then it had to swallow a $1.4 billion charge related to its acquisition of the Net phone app.

“The charge includes a payment of $530 million to Skype shareholders as part of a payout agreement tied to the company’s financial performance,” said Light Reading at the time, going on:

“The payout agreement was worth as much as $1.7 billion, so the fact that payment comes in much lower than that indicates that Skype has not met financial targets.”

The only people laughing were, and presumably still are, Kazaa/Skype creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

“While Zennström is leaving the CEO post immediately, he’ll become nonexecutive chairman of Skype’s board of directors,” said BusinessWeek exactly two years later. “Friis, who has been working on new initiatives at Skype part-time for the past year, will no longer have a role in the company,” set the story, going on:

“The executive shuffle doesn’t end there: Geoffrey Prentice, who developed Skype’s original business plan and found the seed financing that got it off the ground, will leave his post as overseer of strategic partnerships, corporate development, and business operations.”

In May, 2007, eBay bought website ‘recommendation’ engine StumbleUpon for $75 million’, says TechCrunch.

Now, “less than a year and a half later, they’re trying to unload it according to a source with knowledge of the sale process,” it states.

eBay has all kinds of loyal punters who’ll apparently put up with anything and everything.

Good thing.

Light Reading – EBay: Too Much Hype in Skype, October 1, 2005
BusinessWeek – EBay’s Skype Bubble Bursts, October 1, 2007
TechCrunch -  That Was Fun, But Now Ebay’s Selling Off StumbleUpon, September 18, 2008

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Off Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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