Category: Uncategorized

If you are a reader of one of my blogs and are interested in ASP and Enterprise Software blogging, please feel free to contact me. I will be transitioning out of my role as an author at the CIO Weblog to fortify my efforts in other areas. Creative Weblogging will be looking at qualified candidates.

I plan to go through a process of changing my ante in the blogging world as well as rebalancing the consulting projects I am working on. 2005 has really been the personal year of the blog for me, having started more than five blogs with serious effort and joining a blogging company. For reasons too detailed to go into here, the fuel is waning on some of these efforts, and I am trying to figure out where I am going to make my next mark. I will continue to strenghen my efforts at 21Publish, but other things are up in the air, and I will ante down in some areas. The organizing principles for me are based on how I can contribute to 1) entrepreneurism or ventures or 2) social good. Any thoughts are welcome.

My post eBay Acquires Skype indicated some referral traffic from Professor Alex Brown at the University of Delaware, College of Business & Economics. Professor Brown appears to be using his blog to both 1) offer students an opportunity to express interest to cover and analyze the eBay-Skype deal in a marketing class and 2) point students to information and opinions about the deal in the blogosphere.

This is a good, and often forgotten, example of how professors can make their business courses very timely and relevant to students. It is also a good example of how professors can use blogging technologies to communicate with their students.

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.