Ebay News & Articles

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs in our spiffy little corner of the world. Our bi-weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week (and if you're hiring, post your openings here).

The hacking collective, Anonymous, has started a new campaign aimed at two of the web's biggest brands, encouraging users to close their accounts and use alternative services.

Adding to its string of e-commerce acquisitions this year, eBay (news, site) has purchased Zong, a mobile payments vendor, for US$ 240 million. 

As part of its quest for world domination in e-commerce, eBay (news, site) announced today that it has completed its acquisition of GSI Commerce Inc., a provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services

There's a lot of interest in Magento this week, and it's not because of the new X-Men movie (okay, that's Magneto, but you get the picture). eBay (news, site) has acquired the company, after first investing in it a year ago, and is using it, as well as a number of other e-commerce acquisitions recently, to create an e-commerce platform called X.Commerce.

The mobile space is always ready for a good dust-up, will Microsoft's (news, site) Windows Phone 7 be the one to shake the Apple tree?

Well guys, it’s safe to say that we’re finally in the clear.

For awhile there things looked pretty bad for Skype (news, site), as eBay and the platform’s original co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis battled it out over legal issues.

The whole sitch started looking up a couple weeks ago when the opposing sides finally came to an agreement, granting Skype ownership of critical software. The settlement opened up some doors, and last Thursday eBay sold a 70 percent stake in the company for somewhere around US$ 1.9 billion up front with another US$ 125 million on the way. The remaining 30 percent stays with eBay. 

Zennstrom and Friis now have a substantial hold on their creation through Joltid, part of the investor group that purchased the large chunk from the auction king. 

Among the relieved is Skype CEO Josh Silverman, who says, “You’ll see Skype become a lot more ubiquitous in a lot more places, both mobile devices as well as embedded devices,” he says, adding “expect to see us on a lot more platforms.”

Follow them here, and let's see how things fare in 2010. 

Well kids, it looks like it’s come down to official legal charges. Again. That is to say, Skype (news, site) founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström are suing eBay for what they claim is a violation of their license agreement and copyright infringement.

Though Friis and Zennstrom insist they are not seeking to halt it, we’re guessing that this new development doesn’t exactly help eBay’s recent arrangement to sell the Internet telephony platform.

So, what’s up with Skype? Good question. The VoIP service (news, site) has certainly been through the wringer lately, especially with what was originally intended to be an expansion of the service turning into an all out licensing war between eBay and Skype founders over the core code.

Fans of the platform have been waiting for someone to make a move, and now it’s here in the form of a sale. A US$ 2.7 billion sale.

Skype fans, we have something to tell you and you’re not gonna to like it: your Internet telephony service of choice may soon be defunct.

Why would a platform with twice the number of Facebook users (480 million and counting) go kaput, you ask? Well, because along the way a lot of lame stuff happened, and now eBay is being sued for breaching the licensing agreement for the peer-to-peer technology at the heart of Skype, which was not included when the auction king bought it back in 2005.

A recent Evans Data survey divulges that eBay is considered the best overall Web 2.0 developer program over other online darlings like Google, Amazon, MSN, Yahoo, and even dear ol’ cousin PayPal.