Ebay sells majority in skype for amazing price – a win-win-win deal?!

I was quite surprised today to read the headline of the deal between ebay and a private equity about the sale of the majority of skype. But I was even more surprised about the price they achieved, which values skype at $2.75billion. ebay paid including payouts to founders about $3.1bn, but had written down later $900millions.

Obviously ebay could neither find the benefits or integrate skype, nor were they able to grow the business with a clear vision.
This deal could be a real win-win-win. Considering that ebay got a good price, kept a participation to still get an upside and the investors obviously see more value in Skype. At a level of estimated $600 million revenues this year, more than 405 million registered users and generating profits (source spiegel.de: talks about a growth of 25% of benefits to $170 million in the 2nd quarter).

I share the vision of the investors that skype with the increasing penetration of powerful smartphones like Google Android or iphones has a great opportunity to establish itself as the leading VoIP tool for the mobile market as well.
The Telco operator start feeling the pressure and might realize that the iphone is more of a value destroyer than creator (see also Strand Consult latest report “The moment of truth, a portrait of the iphone”)

Mobile data prices are plummeting as you can see in Spain with pay-as-you-go prices of 3ct/MB and e.g. UK/Italy/Austria (basically 3 Three territory) with 15€/mes for 15GB !!!

What do you think, are we getting to a mayor disruption in telecommunications with the shift to VoIP happening acceleratingly fast and mobile operators will one morning just wake up with no high-margin circuit-switched calls left?!

From a consumer and innovation perspective we can only hope so. It will enable us to communicate free with friendss all over the world wherever we are.

[Also the latest beta versions of skype have great collaboration features like sharing the desktop on video calls! try it out]

[just saw that Enrique Dans is commenting on the cost of international calls. "Will be FREE"]

Will providing free access to their core assets allow facebook & twitter to become profitable?

The open question around facebook and twitter remains how these companies will ever become profitable. Of course their solution is advertising, like so many other businesses that all rely on one or another form of advertising.

But lately the discussion has become even more interesting as these companies have provided access via web services to their key assets (content and social relationships), which will create a huge ecosystem of applications around it.

The question is if in such a model they can still find a way to make money?!

“Executives at Facebook say that as the premier social engine of the Web, it will ultimately find a way to make money. For example, it could choose to transmit ads along with the activity streams of its members, and perhaps split the revenue with the developers, though it says it currently has no plans to do so.

Of course, once you prop open the door to the store and give the merchandise away, the money-making options tend to be limited.” (source: NY Times May 3rd, 2009)

While I’m in general very skeptical on the idea that all businesses can get profitabel via advertising revenues, I’m a believer of the idea to create a ecosystem around the core assets by making them available to other application, which at the end make the whole user experience richer. the biger the ecosystem the higher the chances to become to ‘google’ of the social communities, basically create a monopoly, which than can be turned into money.

Following up on a friend’s comment last night

Yesterday over dinner I was discussing with a friend which eCommerce companies, startups or newcomers from other countries have been the most successful in 2008 in Spain.

After thinking for a while we realized that there are not that many. There are quite some internet companies in Spain and many successful ones (e.g. softonic, idealista.com), but few that I would consider under the category eCommerce.

http://www.lamejorpaginaweb.com promotes segundamano.es (most known) and dooyoo.es (best) as the winners for 2008. Without a doubt these are successful eCommerce sites, but neither one of those I would consider really a newcomer or startup.

What do you think?and which interesting eCommerce startups are out there in Spain?