The Download Blog

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something's standing in the way: Skype's founders are threatening to take back some of the technology amid a licensing dispute.

The auction giant's solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: build a new one.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether "Frankenskype" or "Skypenstein" is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

Here's what has happened: Skype's founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype's technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn't have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype's code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back. (Is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But the catch is that the trial isn't scheduled until next June, which could put a big roadblock in the way of eBay's plans for a Skype IPO.

So that's why eBay is working on a total rebuild of Skype's software.

There is, however, this little issue. "The new software will be expensive and might not work," Bloomberg's article summarized. "The company said it might have to shut down Skype if the dispute with the founders isn't resolved."

eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion, but it hasn't proven to be the best fit for the company. Rumors circulated that it was looking to sell Skype, possibly to Google, but then opted to take the company public instead.

Download Skype for Windows | Mac | iPhone | Windows Mobile from CNET Download.com.

Grizzled eBay veterans know all too well that the action on any auction doesn't heat up until the last few minutes. Bidding wars can be won and lost by who had the fastest click--or the highest auto-bid. To aid in this nail-biting process is Snipe Swipe, a "sniping" tool with a new Firefox add-on that does the bidding for you at the very last possible second.

Once installed you'll get a new button on any auction page that lets you set it to be sniped. After you've done this, it gets flagged in Snipe Swipe's system and will be bid on, up to the maximum amount you set, even if your computer is off.

Because it's part of a sign-up service, you only get three free "snipes" with Snipe Swipe. After that, you can either go in on a monthly service with unlimited bids, or a $5 bundle of points that can be used on future bids.

It's worth noting that sniping is not discouraged by eBay, as the online auctioneer has its own proxy bidding tool. However, third party tools such as Snipe Swipe are constantly trying to outwit this system, which is why these tools have garnered a less-than-respectable reputation in the eBay community.

Related: eBay opening up add-on marketplace, APIs

Once installed, Snipe Swipe adds a new option to eBay listings to let you attempt to win them at the last second.

(Credit: Mozilla / Snipe Swipe)

(Credit: Skype)

BARCELONA--Skype is racking up deals with mobile handset makers here at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009.

On Tuesday, the company, which is owned by eBay, announced a partnership with Nokia, the largest cell phone maker in the world, to put the Skype Internet calling software onto its phones. Nokia will initially offer Skype on its high-end smartphones, the N-series. The N97, Nokia's flagship device that goes on sale in June, will be the first to have Skype embedded. The Skype feature will start shipping on the device in the third quarter of 2009.

Skype will be integrated into the N97 address book, enabling users to see when Skype contacts are online. It will also let people use Skype's instant-messaging client. Most importantly, N97 users will be able to make free and low-cost phone calls over the Internet whether they are on a 3G cellular network or a Wi-Fi network. The Skype-to-Skype voice calls are free. And the SkypeOut service, which allows calls from Skype to landlines and mobile devices, offers low rates.

Nokia's not the only handset maker to announce a deal with Skype at Mobile World Congress. On Monday, Sony Ericsson announced it would be offering a Skype "panel" on the Windows Mobile Xperia1 device.

Adding Skype to smartphones is a great benefit for consumers, especially people who travel internationally or have friends and family overseas. While pricing on domestic voice services has been dropping like a brick from a third-story window, international rates have remained high.

As a consumer who likes to travel and who happens to be traveling internationally right now for this trade show, I am annoyed and almost angered at the outrageous prices mobile operators charge when customers roam in other countries or make international calls from the U.S. They all try to sell "international" plans to help defray the cost, but the plans themselves cost consumers an extra fee every month regardless of whether they're traveling that month or not.

Skype and other VoIP services offer users a more cost-effective alternative. And Skype on a mobile phone, when accessed on a low-cost data network, could help people who travel frequently or make lots of international calls save tons of money.

Of course, the two smartphone makers Skype has announced as partners here are manufacturers that are already struggling to get their high-end devices on American mobile networks. And my guess is that adding Skype won't do much to convince these operators to offer these phones and subsidize them so that American consumers will buy them.

The reason is pretty simple. AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA know that a wide-scale deployment of Skype on their phones could cannibalize their international voice services and potentially hurt their domestic voice service.

So if by chance, Nokia or Sony Ericsson manages to win approval from a U.S. operator to get these phones on their networks, I wouldn't be surprised if the Skype feature is stripped from the device in the U.S. version.

That said, AT&T is allowing some voice over IP applications to appear on Apple's iPhone App Store. And Skype users are able to make free and low-cost calls through applications, such as Truphone. But for now, AT&T and Apple seem hesitant to allow Skype's powerful brand, which has more than 400 million registered users, to make it onto the iPhone.

On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you're on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.

To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you've clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.

Earlier this week, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp told me this was an idea that had been kicked around the office for years--six in fact, and the only reason it hadn't happened sooner is that Camp and others felt it would diminish the number of people who were populating the service with rated content. That number is still staggering, with more than 35,000 new URLs submitted every day by 6 million registered users. Camp hopes this new install and registration-free solution will make those numbers even larger, and improve some of the uptake as people get to try the service without that first hurdle.

In addition to its exploratory angle, StumbleUpon is introducing a new partner program. Sites that have StumbleUpon installed will be able to offer their users a new "Stumble This" button with a counter on it. When a user clicks this it adds to the number, which can help promote it for other StumbleUpon members. It's also got an option right underneath the counter that lets users jump to another piece of related content, something Camp says should drive traffic to other existing posts. It's worth noting this is different from the previously existing StumbleThru feature, which would do this randomly.

StumbleUpon's new home page will serve as a starting point to various bits of media, and exploring it no longer requires a software toolbar. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: StumbleUpon)

The partner program is launching on four sites Tuesday night, including political blogging network The Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks, Rolling Stone online, and National Geographic. Of the four, Rolling Stone and National Geographic are the most interesting, as users will be able to explore the photo archives with the service's recommendation engine. Like service Photoree, which we checked out back in August, this can be a fun and engaging experience.

Camp says there are 10 other partnerships in the works, including several for video and music content. Eventually the system will be open for anyone to place it on their blog, although Camp says the system needs to be fine-tuned before it's ready for that.

The future of StumbleUpon

When I asked Camp for comment on the rumored sale of StumbleUpon from parent company eBay, he said he "couldn't talk about any rumors." However, what's interesting is that this new system could be ported over to eBay, or any other product site, which is something many were expecting when the company was acquired last year. "This does open us up," he said. "We're a lot more media focused, and this would allow us to do product discovery."

Presumably with such a system in place you could jump around the site and discover new products while rating them at the same time--something the auction site does not currently provide. Camp says StumbleUpon might one day provide that, but for now he says that realm has already been covered pretty well by search. "(We're) more interested in doing media stuff. There's a greater need for discovery than products right now."

The new StumbleUpon.com should be available right now. Camp says user profiles, reviews, and friends lists will get updated to match the new style in the coming weeks.

(Credit: eBay)

When the native eBay app for iPhone was demoed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June, Webware.com Editor Josh Lowensohn commended it for its slickness, storage capacity, and winning looks. The eBay for iPhone application is indeed easy on the eye and similar in look and feel to eBay Desktop that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux on the AIR platform. At least the home screen is.

After that, the application might as well be considered eBay Light. You can quickly take in an overview of your personal stats on the home screen to see how many items you're watching, winning, outbidding, and so on. Drilling deeper takes you to the My eBay screen, which is tabbed to show greater detail about the items you're watching, buying, and selling. There's also a separate search screen for browsing and reading listings descriptions.

(Credit: eBay)

However, unlike the eBay Desktop and eBay.com, eBay's iPhone app has been stripped of browsing categories and ways for sellers to add or amend input on auction items. This app is strictly for bidding and viewing purposes.

And that's too bad. While limiting the onscreen activities admittedly keeps the application from paralyzing users with choice, it also keeps it from being as useful as it could be. Imagine wanting to add another photo of your sale piece directly from your iPhone, or want to lower the price of a not-so-hot item while waiting to board a plane? And here's a crazy thought--why not clip in to that GPS capability to show users any listed sale items nearby, an estate sale in the neighborhood, for instance?

While the app definitely has its uses as a tracking and bidding tool, I really had expected more iPhone integration from eBay, and at the very least, the visually appealing wrapper from the home screen to carry over into the other views.

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link their profiles to Skype accounts, and will be able to place voice chat calls through the MySpaceIM client or the Skype client to both Skype and MySpace members--but if your MySpace profile is set to "private," you will be exempt from calls from people who aren't on your friends list. The service will be available in the 20 countries where MySpace has "localized communities."

A joint release for the two companies emphasized the sheer number of users that this will encompass: "With more than 110 million monthly active MySpace users and 220 million Skype registered users around the world, this partnership connects two of the most popular communications platforms on the Internet to create the world's largest online, voice-connected community."

But at the same time, only 25 million out of MySpace's 110 million active users have downloaded the MySpaceIM client. And neither company is at the top of its game. MySpace still leads the social-networking field in membership and traffic, but has lost its place in the spotlight to fast-growing rival Facebook. And Skype hasn't exactly turned out to be a real winner for eBay, with some critics saying that the two are mismatched.

Presumably, this will be the "MySpace announcement" that is rumored to take place Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It was originally thought that this announcement would unveil a developer platform for MySpace akin to Facebook's, but credible sources quickly began to hint to multiple news outlets, including CNET News.com, that this would not be the case--a source for gossip blog Valleywag, in fact, indicated that the announcement would deal with the MySpaceIM client.

Firefox is the second-most-popular browser on the Internet, and with good reason--it rocks. Want to try out some specialized versions of it? Here are six flavors of Firefox, ranging from the Mac-centric all the way to bird-themed music jukeboxes.

Firefox Campus Edition
The Campus edition is the most recent of the branded/sponsored/partnered Firefoxes. There's nothing particularly special or amazing about this version of Firefox that's different from the regular one, besides a bundle of extensions and add-ons that give Firefox a notably "social" feel. Campus edition ships with a trifecta of extensions, including Zotero, StumbleUpon (also for Internet Explorer), and Foxytunes. Clearly the most useful one of the bunch for education is Zotero, a note-taking tool that lets you collect sources while doing Internet research. StumbleUpon and FoxyTunes remain in the entertainment realm.

Firefox eBay edition
Firefox eBay edition actually came out before the Campus edition, but the idea is similar--it's just Firefox with a smattering of themed add-ons. In the case of eBay edition, you get an integrated eBay sidebar that lets you keep track of your profile and any auctions you're watching. Likewise, you get an Alert Box tool, which will let you know if you've been outbid. These are solid tools if you're a heavy eBay user, and if you're already a Firefox user you can download an extension bundle that gives you the same functionality. Also coming soon for eBay buffs: an eBay buying and selling application that runs sans browser on Adobe's AIR platform.

Netscape Navigator 9
Don't let the name fool you--Netscape 9 looks and plays just like Firefox. It even works with Firefox add-ons and extensions. So what's the big difference? For one, the browser shares tight integration with Netscape's social bookmarking and news site, along with some cool tweaks such as URL correction and built-in integration to Netscape mail. Webware.com took a look at the service when it launched in early June.

Flock
Flock is probably the most specialized of the customized browsers built off of Firefox. It calls itself the "social" browser, which is somewhat true, considering Web browsing is almost always a one-person affair. Flock ties into several social Web services, like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati. There's also a customized way to bookmark content you like, using a starring system similar to that of Gmail. If you find anything you like, give it a star, and you'll be able to come back to it quickly without having to bother saving it to your bookmarks folder. Similar to Netscape Navigator, Flock will still work with most Firefox extensions, although some are unsupported and can cause instability.

Songbird
Songbird is probably the most experimental browser of the bunch, in the sense that it's not really a browser as much as a music player. The service is still built with Firefox technologies, and lets you browse the Web as you would on Firefox. The easiest way to explain it is that Songbird is a marriage of your Web browser with a music jukebox of the likes of iTunes. If you run into any page that includes music files, Songbird will pull them out and let you listen to them in any order you want with its built-in player. The service is still growing and adding features on an almost daily basis. While stable it may not be at all times, it's a great way to mix browsing the Web with other activities.

Camino
Camino (formerly known as Chimera) is an open-source Web browser that uses Mozilla's Geko rendering engine (the same as used in Firefox) to create a Mac-optimized browsing experience. At first glance it doesn't seem too different from the Mac version of Firefox, but there are a handful of Mac-centric additions, such as using the operating system's built-in Cocoa programming environment, a dictionary application for spell check, and the use of OS X's key chain application instead of Firefox's proprietary system to save site passwords. If you really love your extensions, don't ditch Firefox for this, but if you'd like to use some of your native Mac services, Camino makes for a great secondary to Safari or Firefox.

eBay Auction Sniper and Auto Search

(Credit: PowerSnipe)

If eBay's 50 percent growth this last fiscal quarter is any indication, online auctions are still a favorite way to shuffle goods and pocket extra change. Power sellers--those eBay auctioneers who sell and gross high volumes--have gained the edge by applying their business savvy and possibly using one of the many auction software options from CNET Download.com. One popular program is AlienFiles, a listings creator and editor that supports multimedia files and helps manage your sale items.

There's plenty here for power buyers, too. Check out eBay Auction Sniper and AutoSearch, for instance, which automatically bids on your behalf in the fierce final seconds.

Which app makes you a happy collector or auctioneer?