What would you pay for a fast-growing private internet company with hundreds of millions of active users and revenues of more than $500m?

If the name on the door is Facebook the answer, apparently, is: $6.5bn. That’s the valuation implied by the recent offer to Facebook employees from Digital Sky Technologies (the Russian investment firm also bought a chunk of preferred stock from Facebook that the company claimed valued it at $10bn, but that sounded like hype given that the benefits attached to those shares were not disclosed.)

So the $3.1bn $2.75bn valuation that has just been slapped on Skype sounds respectable - and is certainly more reasonable than the laughably low offers of $2bn or so that eBay was being encouraged to entertain earlier this year (curiously, eBay will not explain the difference between the $3.1bn value implied by its deal and the headline figure of $2.75bn that it claims for Skype). Continue reading "eBay’s Skype blushes spared"

It’s hard to escape the view that what really annoys the European book industry about Google’s ambitious digital library project is that only US internet users will be allowed to browse in it.

According to some estimates, a third or more of the in-copyright books that Google is scanning in US libraries are from European publishers and authors, but European internet users won’t get to see these works. The legal settlement only involves the digital rights to display them in the US.

If this galvanises Europe to work harder to create the conditions for its own digital library, so much the better. But as EU commissioner Viviane Reding warned at the end of this week, there are some significant hurdles to be overcome. Continue reading "Europe’s digital library stuck in the slow lane"

Venture capitalists are professional optimists - they have to be. How else could they keep investing in new businesses where the obstacles to success would seem insurmountable to most people?

But sometimes reality just has to be faced, and the reality in front of the VC industry right now is not pretty.

Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital sums it up here: half the industry could be swept away by the current downturn (though as an optimist, he clearly thinks he will end up in the fortunate half). Continue reading "The VC shake-out is finally at hand (really)"

In the evolution of the Amazon Cloud, Wednesday’s news of a trial service designed specifically for the core applications of large companies seems to mark a watershed.

So far, the Amazon pitch has mainly been directed at smaller companies, or at bigger ones looking for somewhere to host high-volume Web services. It is now trying to take things one step further. Continue reading "Amazon sets its sights on enterprise IT"

It may have taken close to 10 months, but opposition to the Google book settlement has finally coalesced.

The Open Book Alliance formally launched today with this promise:

The Open Book Alliance will counter Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild’s scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.  To this end, we will promote fair and flexible solutions aimed at achieving a more robust and open system.

Continue reading "Google books: battle lines are drawn"

Citizendium was meant to represent an advance on Wikipedia. Compared to the flame wars and defacement that occasionally blight articles on the popular online encyclopedia, Citizendium founder Larry Sanger wanted to create a place for the world to share its knowledge in a more controlled atmosphere. He saw it as somewhere that expertise would be given its due and where the discussion could rise above the rabble (see today’s news for Wikipedia’s own latest attempt to control the crowd).

It only added to the intrigue that Sanger and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s Svengali, had fallen out badly - indeed, were in dispute over how much credit each should get for the creation of Wikipedia in the first place (see Sanger’s Wikipedia page for more).

Now, Sanger tells me, he wants to move on from Citizendium, and is looking for a suitable institution to take over management of his pet project - though he promises he will not leave it in the lurch (see the comment added below). Continue reading "Citizendium founder ready to jump ship"

“Good enough” used to be Microsoft’s mantra: why pay more for corporate IT when Windows on the server works well enough in most situations?

That same argument has been turned against it by a succession of rivals, from Linux to Google Apps. These and many others have exposed Microsoft’s feature-creep and often left it defending the higher-cost option (and led it to look to defensive alliances like one with Nokia - see note below).

In emerging markets, though, Microsoft has less of an entrenched business to defend and is freer to innovate. Take today’s news from Redmond, of a Java-like environment with the potential to turn hundreds of millions of standard mobile phones into simple internet-connected devices. Continue reading "For Microsoft innovation, look to emerging markets"

The unveiling of Nokia’s new Booklet 3G is the second piece of news this month to highlight the striking change that has gone on in the relationship between the once implacable enemies from the mobile and PC worlds. For both companies this makes eminent sense - up to a point.

The first development was the agreement to put Microsoft’s Office on Nokia’s handsets (though timing and product details were entirely absent). This involved the tacit admission from Microsoft that its Windows Mobile platform was losing ground. With RIM, Apple and Google making the running, it was time to seed its software on other platforms, even if that meant cozying up to Nokia. Continue reading "The Nokia/Microsoft truce, Part 2"