EBays Billion Dollar Lesson in the Value of Hype – New York Times Blog. at least lots of people were skeptical at the time when ebay bought skype.

Skype: What happened on August 16. skype claims that their outage was due to a crazy number of reboots from a windows security update.

GigaOM » Gizmo, now making browser based phone calls. it’s a flash plugin and it lets you make phone calls through a web browser. i didn’t try it out though.

GigaOM » Inside The Venice Project & Exclusive Screen Shots. looks like muchmusic is gonna be on it. venice project is an internet-tv startup by the founders of skype.

Gizmo. looks exactly like skype and is running a free call service similar to skype and jajah

Skype Introduces Free Calls to Traditional Landlines and Mobile Phones in the US and Canada. free skypeout for the rest of the year.

NYTimes reviews device to connect your landline to Skype. $60 device that acts as a “call center” between skype and your phone. some really cool features but for me begs the question “who still has a landline?” Of all the people I know in Seattle only one has a landline (and it’s through vonage).

I saw a posting about jajah and couple weeks back and thought “what an ugly product name and logo. pass”. Today I read what they do, and it definitely wasn’t a pass, it’s actually quite impressive. I haven’t tried the service (but I’ll update the post once I do). It’s a pretty simple idea: go the website, enter your phone number and the number you want to call, jajah calls you and once you pick up your phone, calls the other number. Seems they run their servers out of ireland and offer some dirt cheap rates (like 1.7 cents from the US to Canada or Russia, for example).

SkypeOut offers similar rates but also requires you to install their app, have a headset if you want good quality, and then you have to sit by your computer. You might also ask “I can get the same rate with a calling card”, which is true except for the fact that every calling card I’ve ever used that doesn’t have 3-minute rounding, connection charges, and expires in 3 months was actually 3 cents a minute (which is almost twice as much at 1.7 cents). What I think is really interesting is that any website could setup a “reverse toll free number” with jajah. For example, I was recently looking online for hotels in italy, many of which are family run or small operations. Their basic website could have a “jajah-call-me” widget. You would enter your number, jajah calls you and then the hotel, you either speak to someone or leave a voicemail, and jajah bills the hotel. Google is actually testing a similar service for adWords.

Skype. Now I realize that skype isn’t new and that it’s quite popular but after using it for the first time last night all I can say is “wow”. Other than being free and dead easy to use, the voice quality blew the socks off my normal cell-to-cell calls. With dirt cheap rates to dial out to most of the world and €30/year to get a local number in 12 different countries, i’m starting to see why ebay dropped $2.6 billion for the company. go estonia!

Cringley on the Ebay/Skype Deal. Really, I still haven’t seen a convincing arguement that this was a great deal for Ebay but Cringely, as usual, makes some great points. My only thought: This is Ebay’s in-road to make PayPal actually competitive with Visa/MC. If Skype becomes the defacto VOIP for 500 million paying customers (instead of 50 million barely-paying customers) and they’re all using PayPal, then PayPal becomes an equal pay method in the mind of customers. Then eBay is taking VISA/MC’s small cut on piles of new transactions.