Forget Skype, Google Acquires Gizmo5 VoIP Startup Instead

Wow, remember a few weeks ago when Skype was beset by multiple legal actions from its founders and was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5 to replace the underlying codebase that they were being sued over? Well things seem to be moving fast in the VoIP world because today, not only did Skype and its founders come to an agreement and save the underlying codebase, but Gizmo5 got acquired after all–just not by who’d we expect.

Google pounced on the peer-to-peer VoIP provider Gizmo5 just as its chances of being acquired by Skype had been dashed. Gizmo5 is an unscaled, but proven peer-to-peer VoIP provider. It has six million users for its SIP-based P2P VoIP service. The service would add the a PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones which Google Voice currently lacks. According to TechCrunch sources, Google has bought Gizmo5 for $30 million, but the official announcement has yet to be made.

According to the Washington Post, Skype was going to purchase peer-to-peer VoIP startup Gizmo5 for around $50 million. The purchase was part of a back-up plan in the event that it’s lawsuit with Joltid resulted in the company not having access to the underlying code Skype uses to make VoIP calls.

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Skype Adds 37M More Users, Revenue Jumps To $170M In Q2

Skype’s second-quarter revenue increased 25 percent year-over-year to $170 million, according to financial statements released by corporate parent eBay. Skype also saw its registered user base grow to 480.5 million for a staggering 75 million user increase during the first half of 2009.

Skype’s second-quarter revenue was up $17 million from Q1, a 9 percent increase, and it also added 37.3 million new users in Q2, slightly less than the 37.9 million it added in Q1.

According to the earnings release, Skype in addition to adding users, the company is also "focused on product strategies to enhance customer engagement."

Another positive quarter of growth for Skype could mean an increased IPO price as eBay gears up to take the VoIP company public in early 2010. That is, of course, if eBay and Skype’s cofounders settle a lawsuit over the P2P tech that’s at the heart of Skype’s client.

For more:
- see the press release here 

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Vonage Will Release Apps For Smartphones

Skype founders want to buy back company from eBay

It looks like a serious bid to buy Skype from eBay is coming to the table from co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The duo have reportedly talked up several private equity firms to put together a multi-billion dollar offer for Skype.

Reports say eBay wants at least the $1.7 billion current book value of Skype, while Zennstrom and Friis are trying to raise a billion in private cash with eBay possibly putting a seller’s note together for another $1 billion. Given Skype had revenues of $145 million in Q4 2008, setting up a financing instrument for the purchase of a company expected to generate more than $500 million in 2009 shouldn’t be that tough.

Skype was originally sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion and bonus payments increased the final price to $3.1 billion, so both Zennstrom and Friits are also likely good for a large chunk of cash on a repurchase effort.

Since buying Skype, eBay has been confused as to what to do with the company, ‘fessing up that the communications company hasn’t blended well with its core competencies of e-commerce and payments businesses.

Other buyers for Skype may be scared off/locked out of discussions due to low-key intellectual property discussion between eBay and Skype founders. In a recent regulatory filing, Joltid, which - surprise — was founded by Zennstrom and Friis - has terminated eBay’s license to Joltid’s peer-to-peer technology at the heart of Skype. The lawsuit is currently in a British court and also begs the question as to why eBay didn’t get exclusive rights to Skype’s peer-to-peer technology in the first place when it shelled out the original $2.6 billion.

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Skype For iPhone Gets 2 Million Downloads In One Week

Skype reported Tuesday it has logged 2 million downloads for its Skype for iPhone application, a bit more than a week after the application was released at CTIA. To get such a number, downloads have had to occur at an average of two to three per second since the app first appeared.

It’s a big number considering that around 4 million iPhones have sold between product launch and the end of 2008, but you could dilute it down a bit if you throw in however many million iPod Touch owners may have downloaded the app.

Regardless, 2 million downloads in a week is still a big number, no matter how you might want to divvy up the pie between the total number of iPhones and iPod Touches sold. It is also likely a number to grow larger and be freely bandied about during Skype’s lobbying efforts at the FCC and the EU, as it fights restrictions and/or banning of the application by carriers.

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Skype Fuels FCC Fight for an Open Wireless Internet

Skype’s free iPhone application is stirring up debate again. Available on Apple’s App Store on March 31, the app first stirred debate after being blocked by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. Now Skype is fueling debate on network neutrality.

Skype’s Voice over Internet Protocol app gives users Skype calling and instant messaging on Apple iPhones and second-generation iPod touches. The application, which saw more than one million downloads in the first two days after being made available, allows users to make calls on the iPhone over a Wi-Fi connection, but not on AT&T’s 3G cellular network.

The limitation, which has been formally imposed by Apple’s App Store policies, has caused groups such as the Free Press to ask the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether Apple and AT&T are breaking federal rules. The Free Press wants the FCC to clarify whether its Internet Policy Statement for an open Internet applies to wireless service providers who also offer broadband Internet access service.

Competition at Core

The Free Press complaint comes after a senior AT&T official was quoted in USA Today as saying that AT&T expects its vendors to not facilitate the services of competitors. That statement indicates it won’t be developers who have control over wireless innovations, but wireless carriers through restrictive language used to control the use of applications and services on their network, according to the Free Press.

The Free Press says the mobile Internet should be as free as the Internet users access from fixed locations.

“This issue is not new — it is simply unresolved,” said Ben Scott, policy director at the Free Press. “Wise voices at the FCC have long said that the Internet Policy Statement applies to wireless. As more and more consumers begin to access the Internet wirelessly, it is critical that the FCC clarifies that online consumer protections that…

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German Telecom Bans Use of Skype on the iPhone

Just two days after announcing an application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, Skype has hit a roadblock. On Thursday, Deutsche Telekom, a German wireless provider, banned use of the application on the iPhone and said anyone caught using it will face a contract suspension.

Skype, owned by eBay, has more than 405 million registered users who communicate for free by voice, video calls, and instant messages.

Deutsche Telekom, which has exclusive rights to the iPhone in Germany through its T-Mobile business, said iPhone contracts block Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls, which Skype uses. The blocking has been in the contracts since 2007, spokesperson Alexander von Schmettow told the Associated Press.

Schmettow said using the iPhone application, which offers free Skype-to-Skype calls and fee-based calls to mobile devices and landlines, could slow down T-Mobile’s network.

Blatant Blocking

Skype’s legal counsel, Robert Miller, charged that Deutsche Telekom is using technology as an excuse to blatantly block Skype. He insisted the network is not slowed.

Nearly 24 hours after being made available, the free application had more than 600,000 downloads through Apple’s App Store, according to Skype.

“What amazes me is that Skype is the number-one download on the App Store in Germany, and yet the country’s dominant telecom operator, Deutsche Telekom, has already made it known that it would block the use of Skype on iPhone and BlackBerry, both for its mobile network customers and at its Wi-Fi hot spots,” Miller wrote in a blog post.

“I find it quite telling that Deutsche Telekom would be so bold as to announce this arbitrary blocking of Skype,” he said. “They pretend that their action has to do with technical concerns; this is baseless. Skype works perfectly well on iPhone, as hundreds of thousands of people globally can already readily attest.”

Worlds Collide

“It underscores the tension as…

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Skype For iPhone Now Available In U.S.

Engadget has a report on how Skype for the iPhone is doing so far…

It’s finally here, and even a few minutes early.  Skype for iPhone is now available in the US iTunes store, free of charge. We’ve heard great thing from the folks in Japan who’ve been fiddling with it for the last twelve hours, and so far it’s sounding pretty good for us, too, with only minor hiccups. Not sure if it’s a glitch, but despite what we heard earlier, we seem to be able to dial out while on 3G and not over WiFi (at least running OS 3.0 beta). Hit up the read link for quickest route to the app store page, and let us know what you think. Betcha wish you could ditch that AT&T voice plan now, huh?

Update: We’re getting reports the app is crashing for jailbroken iPhones — and possibly non-jailbroken ones as well. We just got our first denial when dialing out over 3G via a popup notification, but it only happened once and we were back to old habits one call later. We did experience a brief period where no sound was coming through, but that might have something to do with using OS 3.0 and was remedied by restarting the phone.

Update 2: So far, it looks like dialing over 3G’s only working for those with OS 3.0 beta, but unfortunately all of us in that situation are now suffering from frequent crashes and loss of audio. Things seem to be going smoothly for those running the latest non-beta firmware, but the calls only work over WiFi. That said, when using the app as intended (non-beta firmware over WiFi), audio quality was surprisingly good, far better than any third party apps we’ve used.

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Google Voice Chatter Could Be a Legal Nightmare

Google’s new telephone service, Google Voice, is receiving generally positive reviews from industry analysts. Some of the features, however, are raising potentially troubling legal issues.

Nearly two years ago, Google bought Grand Central, an Internet-based phone service, and opened it up to a limited number of beta testers. Over the following months, users got increasingly impatient with the lack of new features or upgrades to the service.

It turns out, however, that Grand Central was merely on hold as Google undertook a complete revamping of the service to better integrate it into the Google universe. Current users and new subscribers will be able to read transcripts and search text of their voice mails, make low-cost overseas calls and free calls within the United States, set up free conference calls, and redirect both calls and text messages to up to six different numbers at the same time.

But not surprisingly, given Google’s increasingly dominant online profile, the news that the company is doing for voice what it’s done for virtually every other type of data has raised questions about both privacy and legality. Critics are worried about yet another data stream flowing through the Google server farms.

Scanning Phone Calls

In a widely reported interview, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the new service raises worrisome issues. "It raises two distinct problems," he said. "In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company."

Since even Google hasn’t figured out how to repeal the laws of economics, the obvious question is how the company will be able to support the undeniably attractive offer of free telephone calls, voice-mail transcriptions, and so on. As with other Google services, the answer is likely to be…

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Star Trek Communicator to finally become phone for VoIP crowd?

A few years back, an upstart cell phone company announced the holy grail for geeks to great fanfare … a cellphone that looked like a Star Trek Communicator. Everyone signed up to get word of when this cool homage to sci-fi geekery would ship and it was destined to be a very popular product. I mean, who wouldn’t want to indulge in a little “beam me up Scotty” fantasy while making a call to work? But alas, it wasn’t to be as a few months later, the company announced they couldn’t make it work, nor would Paramount/Viacom play ball if they did. Ready for round two? Only this time, it’s a VoIP/Skype platform that has the eye of Captain Kirk’s favorite method communication. Will geeks finally get their due? Or is it just another interstellar carrot on a stick?

The company announcing the deal is a small computer gadget company called “Dream Cheeky,” and the phone itself, sadly, will be tethered to your PC as it’s a USB VoIP Phone which will plug in to any PC and work on any OS be it XP, Vista or OS X. The Communicator comes with speakerphone, volume and mute control, and, of course, the obligatory sound effects and cool lines of dialogue which add to the fantasy.

No word on pricing, just yet, but it should be out sometime in April. Yeah, we’ve heard that before.

Source: Coolest Gadgets