The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
The timing could be due to eBay adopting a 'stick to your knitting' strategy to deal with the economic downturn (the company just agreed to sell StumbleUpon back to its founders), but there are also suspicions that it may be related to the cancellation of a technology licence between Joltid and eBay.
Joldid has alleged that eBay's Skype operation is in breach of the licence. This appears to be related to Skype being required by a US court to disclose the code in a patent case.
Skype has asked the English High Court to declare that its use of the code and the disclosure are lawful and that the notices of breach and termination by Joltid are invalid.
"Skype is confident of its legal position," eBay officials said in a US SEC filing.
If the High Court does not rule in eBay's favour, it's hard to see what it has to offer in the planned IPO, as it seems the technology is at the core of Skype's operation.
While Skype is perhaps best known for free user-to-user calls, its revenue comes mainly from calls to or from conventional or mobile phones. Skype is estimated to deliver as much as eight percent of international call minutes, making it the world's largest international voice carrier.
There was recent speculation that Skype's founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were preparing to buy back the company for substantially less than they received from eBay.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
