Category: Uncategorized

From CEO Meg Whitman. Although I did not know there was 54 million Skype users (I neither follow Skype’s nor eBay’s operations closely), this number doesn’t change my initial impressions of the deal.

Update: Some financial info related to Skype in terms of 2004 and 2005 revenues. Pretty rapid growth in revenue since 2004 was $7M in revenue and 2005 is projected to be a $60M+ year.

Update: To clarify my position, I don’t buy the synergy play in terms of how the deal is valued and/or how financial value is created, but I do believe Skype is a great company. It is scary that the company could have been built that fast.

Update (9/13/05): Good analysis by Nivi on the eBay-Skype deal. As I mentioned before, I am on the same side of the fence that the deal is not about synergies (in the classic business use of the term). One question to ask though is whether there can actually be a VoIP monopoly that cannot be toppled. Consider how fast Skype rose to power. How big are the barriers to entry for this sort of thing? Can additional barriers be built up? What about raising the switching costs off of Skype? The Skype earnout (whether directly or indirectly) surely prices in some of the management team’s ability to create more barriers to competitors, but I’m not sure that’s the perfect insurance card for eBay. Did we manage to lock up all the smart Estonians in the deal too?

Update (9/13/05): Will Hsu (eBay) has a post on market reactions and movement related to the eBay-Skype deal. He also points me to a PDF that outlines eBay’s view on synergies. To be frank, I haven’t digested the file, listened to the press conference, etc. I did scan to see that the presentation draws a similarity of the acquisition to the PayPal deal which accelerated revenue by reducing buyer-seller friction. That said, I think that a lot of people were already using PayPal before the eBay deal hit, so the risks associated with acquisition were reduced and synergies could be "proven in" in some sense before a big chunk of change was plopped down. Plus, I think payment is a bit of a different animal, right?

Update (9/13/05): Good Infectious Greed summary of the eBay-Skype it slices, dices, chops thing.

Update (9/13/05): Phil Windley et. al. on eBay-Skype from slightly different angle on identity 2.0.

Update (9/23/05): Fred Wilson weighs in a third time.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has the popular opinion poll going on over at his blog about the eBay and Skype rumor. My comment is about the 23rd down on the list. Maybe it will be the dinner conversation piece Friday night with the i-bankers.

I use del.icio.us as a filing system for things on the web. Today, the user interface for del.icio.us looks like the equiavlent to finding one’s file cabinet with no file folders and all the individual papers stacked in chronological order (but with little Post-It notes saying which file folder the paper belonged in). How useful is this latter filing system to me? Today I had to find something that I filed in del.icio.us, and now I can’t find it. I know that del.icio.us is a popularity tool to some, a wisdom of crowds things for others, but for me a big portion of del.icio.us is in its use as a productivity and organization tool. I even started to train some workers using del.icio.us (for knowledge sharing of things on the net). Is the definition of the tool changing? Or is it just a service issue or temporary bug? Or is it just a user interface change that I don’t understand?

Remember to check out the Q&A I promised about here.

I’m testing out FeedBlitz as an email subscription method for people to get blog updates of the Feedburner feed of this blog. I know that there are still some renegade RSS feeds out there, but I haven’t got the bandwidth to consolidate. See the righthand side of the blog for the new FeedBlitz form window. Hat tip to Fred Wilson.

If you are ever in Dallas, I think that it is worthwhile to see perhaps the largest fossilized sea turtle in the world at the Dallas Museum of Natural History. It is called the Protostega, and is estimated to be around 90 million years old. The one I link to here (photographed next to a person in 1929) is apparently one the other large turtles (10%-15% shorter) in the world at the Yale Peabody Museum. When you stand underneath the Protostega in Dallas, it looks bigger than a car by a lot. Although dinosaurs are impressive too, the Protostega is basically a turtle. Imagine snorkeling up next to one of these things in Hawaii or something.

Although I enjoy art, wine, education, music, and playing the drums, this is one example of life that reminds me to stay balanced in life. Live, Love, Learn, & Leave and Legacy.

Ten days ago I posted an innocuous link to something about "Ivy League Dating" and mentioned "The Right Stuff" dating website. Although my referral link traffic indicated that the search engines started hitting me just a day or two after I posted, I am the #1 search result on the MSN search engine today (when searching for the term, "Ivy League Dating"). I’m on page #1 for Google. There are many people that I talk with at 21Publish that are just learning about blogs and don’t believe how blogs and blog communities affect search engines. Although it may be a passing thing in a few years, it does seem to affect the engines now. And the trend does seem like it is going to stay with all of the search engine investments going on.

I have got to put up a hipper picture of myself on my blog if I’m going to be in this business.

Update (8/20/05): Now if you really want Ivy League sexy, you need to check out venture capitalist Brad Feld who noticed that the number of shares in secondary offering for Google are the same as eight significant digits of Pi.

I had a look at the new NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) product. Blogged a little about the market space, use-cases of RSS emerging (Sandy and I compared notes on what we were seeing), and the typical profile of the company that might use NGES. While I do not feel comfortable talking about the markets that NewsGator is targeting (because I might misrepresent NewsGator’s strategy), I found it interesting to note some prominent government and education sector customers. I speculate that it has to do with the intensity of information within these organizations. Anyway, check out my post here.