Ebay Completes Sale Of Skype!

Sale Of Skype! Done, Again. snapvoip.blogspot.com
Skype is Sold, yes Again to a group of investors including Silver Lake Partners, Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders), the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
At the sale, Skype was valued at 2.7 Billion according to the Ebay announcement. Ebay has recieved 1.9 Billion in cash and notes valued at 125 Million.
Ebay also hold a 30% stke of Skype and the rest 70% is held by the conglomerate. Recently Ebay settled with Skype founders for 14% stake and board seats. Whatever the results are, Skype founders seem to be the real winners. Hope they will not sue themselves in the future.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) announced today that it has successfully completed the previously announced sale of its Skype communications unit in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz.
eBay received approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company retained an approximately 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The company also purchased senior debt securities with a face value of $50 million as part of a Skype debt financing.

Skype Latest Deal Turning Lawsuits Go Away While Sweet And Sour Taste Lingers?

Skype Deal Turning Sweet And Sour snapvoip.blogspot.com
Looks like Skype founders are getting a stake in the company and a the architects of the deal, Index Ventures might be out of one, if the whisperer(s) are correct.
GigaOM and NYTimes both have published the news and the Joltid will drop the IP lawsuit they had against Skype and Ebay. Everyone seems to be smiling now but hat sour taste, that Skype founders tend to carry around, ever since they sold Skype to EBay, might surface sooner than anyone wants to.
GigaOM, NYTimes via Techcrunch

Skype Kaput?

End of Skype
After all these Skype getting sold and resold while getting sued and re sued I was getting bored with the news. But Tom Keating lit a fire under that boredom, I even mouthed WT? (fill in as suitable as my Grandma has very untasty soap, I would not say the word)
The Original Skype boys have played their cards right or craftily. Because for the money they got, they should have been straight with Ebay. According to Tom's post, Joltid could stop Skype from remotely!

"But to answer your question (about whether Skype could be brought down remotely by Joltid), yes, they have the technical ability to revoke the rights of the SkyLib (a cross-platform library written in C++ that underlies the functionality of Skype on all client platforms) remotely. Joltid CAN inject algorithms into the SkyLib ad-hoc overlay network remotely. What they did with Grokster was not advanced and also didn't use cryptographically secure methods, as they were home rolled. SkyLib does, however, use a proper PKI.
The question you must ask yourself is this: Did Joltid, Inc. hand over their Root Certificates with the acquisition of the Skype Client? No, they did not.
This is a political agenda and not what you might think."

 Like Tom I too thought Ebay was crazy to pay 3 Billion but in this light I winder if crazy was too nice a word.
'Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds' Via VoIP & Gadgets Blog