eBay has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders) and “certain affiliated parties”, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

As previously announced, eBay received approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company also retained an approximately 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The company also purchased senior debt securities with a face value of $50 million as part of a Skype debt financing.

Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.

In an interview with me this morning, Marc Andreessen, one of the investors through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz, told me, “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter, and Josh Silvertman will continue to be CEO.

eBay has just announced that it has reached a settlement with the founders of Skype, clearing the way for the sale of the Internet communication company to a consortium formed by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its partner Mike Volpi is definitely out of the picture (no surprises there). Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.”

The original Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are now back in the game. The Scandinavian businessmen are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the Global Index P2P technology their company Joltid controls (which is key to the Skype software) – and not 10% like previously reported by other media. In addition, Friis and Zennström gain representation on the board of the new entity. The two men are also putting in a ’significant amount of capital’ of their own in exchange for the stake in the new company, presumably through their Atomico Ventures fund.

In our October 8 post on the state of the Skype sale and litigation, we ended with a prediction: “The likely outcome of all of this remains the same – Joltid will get a stake of some size in Skype. But given the players involved, anything could still happen.” If GigaOm and the NYTimes are right, that’s exactly what’s happening. Even the “anything could still happen” part.

The old Skype founders will now have a stake in Skype according to unnamed sources. That makes sense. It was what eBay was negotiating with Skype long before the current buyout offer, and the team has to get something in exchange for dropping the intellectual property litigation.

But Index Ventures, the architect of the deal, is apparently out. For Silverlake Partners and Andreeseen Horowitz to agree to that either means there’s too much money involved for anyone to be worried about business loyalties, or there’s enough of a smoking gun that Index had no choice but to get away from the deal and all that liability.

Whatever the truth, everyone is in for a wild ride. Nobody who does business with the Skype founders ever seems to come out of it happy. Maybe Marc Andreessen has the patience to change all that this time around.

Just one problem, though. No one has ever described Marc Andreessen as a patient man.

Holy m-commerce, Batman!

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application.

The number pales in comparison with eBay’s total sales figure ($59.7 billion last year), but it’s fairly significant considering the fact that the iPhone has a relatively small market share – about 15% of the smartphone segment – and mobile payment transactions are still new to many. Who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store last year?

Even though it is embroiled in a nasty legal battle with its founders over its future, Skype continues to rack up impressive numbers. In today’s third quarter earnings from eBay (which still owns Skype, but is preparing to unload it), the company breaks out Skype’s performance (see slide above).

Skype’s registered users grew 41 percent to 521 million people. That’s a stunning 40 million new registered users in the past three months. Revenues grew 29 percent to $185 million. Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74 percent to 27.7 billion minutes, whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44 percent to 3.1 billion minutes. All of those SkypeOut calls translated to a healthy $185 million in revenues, up 29 percent from a year ago.

On stage at last year’s Le Web an argument broke out between co-founder Loic Le Meur and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington over whether Europe was capable of producing a ‘big win’ Web company or whether Skype was, perhaps, just a one-hit wonder. Like heavyweight fighters, they traded some heavy blows in subsequent blog posts. But during the live on-stage Gilmour Gang, one company was mentioned by Le Meur which left the rest of the assembled staring blankly: Vente Privee.

Probably the reason it prompted such sideways looks, however, is that this is not a classic ‘web app’ startup, but an e-commerce hub. Vente Privee began in France in 2001, but has only recently become a powerhouse of the new wave in Europe: an online private sales club involving designer fashion brands, otherwise known in the fashion retail industry as the “overstock market”. Its success has lead to a bunch of clone sites, while Vente Privee itself is on target to hit €650m in turnonver globally this year. In other words Europe is not out to lunch – as Arrington put it – it is out to shop.

But Vente Privee’s success has now lead to a number of U.S. companies becoming very interested in either entering this world or expanding their operations. TechCrunch Europe thus understands, from some very well placed sources, that Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space. The price for Vente Privee alone is being talked about in terms of a $1.5 billion sale. Some sources even put the figure at between $2 billion and $4 billion.

Don’t be fooled. Even though there hasn’t been any news on the various lawsuits around Skype’s intellectual property ownership, that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening behind the scenes.

Negotiations continue, say multiple sources, between eBay, the new proposed Skype owner group, and the original founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, via their company Joltd, in what is turning into a very high stakes and very emotional game of poker.

Joltid first sued eBay/Skype in July 2009, claiming breach of a license agreement that granted Skype the use of key technology.

Multiple sources have confirmed to us that settlement negotiations were underway with Joltid to give the company a percentage of Skype to drop the litigation. Joltid was to receive “between 5% and 15% of Skype” to settle.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last Tuesday affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss patent claims against Skype and its parent company (for now) eBay relating to uniform network technology. The federal appeals court affirmed without comment the dismissal of claims brought by Peer Communications, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation, reports Law360.

Acacia Research’s subisidiaries are in the business (PDF) of acquiring, developing, licensing and enforcing patents, according to its website.

GigaOm last night already predicted an announcement was forthcoming, but now it’s official: Skype has announced that the beta version of Skype for SIP has been certified as interoperable with Cisco’s Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business.

This will enable SMBs who manage their networking and communications needs with the Cisco solution to communicate more efficiently by directing their outbound calls to mobiles and landlines over Skype’s VoIP service.

The integrated solution will also allow employees to receive inbound calls from Skype users (now over 480 million strong according to the release). Earlier this year, similar arrangements were struck by the eBay company with Shoretel and SIPfoundry’s sipXecs platform.

Sometimes all you need is a map to see where a company is going, or where it got on the wrong track. Take a look at the eBay acquisitions above plotted as a subway map created by the folks at MeetTheBoss. (They also did the same thing for Amazon acquisitions).

The map is color-coded, with different subway lines representing different categories of acquisitions. As long as eBay sticks to central lines close to its main business, its acquisitions have done pretty well. For instance, the yellow line is online auctions (iBazaar, Internet Auction Co., GMarket), orange is retail (Half.com, Shopping.com), and violet is e-commerce (PayPal, Bill Me Later, StubHub).

eBay bought Skype in September 2005 for $4.1 billion. Today they sold 65% of it for much less, valuing Skype at $2.75 billion. It seems like a big loss, and guys like Om Malik are saying eBay shareholders should be angry.

I’m not going to argue with the fact that eBay was negligent in buying a company without taking control of its core intellectual property. But when I look at this deal, and how the market has changed in the last four years, it looks to me like eBay made out ok. Or even more than ok.

First of all, eBay never paid the full $4.1 billion for skype. 2/3 of a $1.5 billion earnout wasn’t paid, so the total purchase price was around $3.1 billion. After the write-downs, eBay was carrying Skype on its books at a value below $2 billion dollars.

Skype is projected to make $200 million of so in EBITDA in 2010, so today’s acquisition implies a 14x multiple on that EBITDA (thanks to Mark Mahaney at Citi Investment Research for the quick financial analysis). Mahaney says “From a non-strategic buyer, that would seem to be a high multiple.” Clearly, ebay got more for Skype than they thought they would.

We now have confirmation of the sale of Skype, a story we broke last week and was yesterday proclaimed a done deal by NY Times reporters.

The acquiring party is indeed an investor group led by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, who likely paid the bulk of the amount Skype was sold for.

Other investors include VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures (a previous investor in Skype), as well as the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board.

The new investors will buy approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion US. eBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The transaction, which is not subject to a financing condition, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

The NY Times is now confirming our report last week the sale of Skype to an investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz is imminent. The deal will be announced Tuesday, says Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, citing unnamed sources (perhaps people that…read our post last week).

As we reported, Index Ventures is also participating in the acquisition. And the unnamed private equity firm is apparently Silver Lake Partners, who is likely supplying the bulk of the capital needed to pay the $2 billion price tag.

eBay, which announced earlier this year that they would be spinning off the company in an initial public offering in 2010, is said to be looking for $2 billion or more for Skype. Companies quite often talk about IPOs (and even actually file) to generate acquisition buzz.

A group of well known venture capital and large private equity firms are pooling resources to make a bid to acquire eBay-owned Skype, according to a source close to the deal.

Investors in the proposed purchase may include newly-formed Andreesen Horowitz, Index Ventures (who were early investors in Skype before the ebay acquisition), and one or more multi-billion dollar private equity firms.

eBay, which announced earlier this year that they would be spinning off the company in an initial public offering in 2010, is said to be looking for $2 billion or more for Skype. Companies quite often talk about IPOs (and even actually file) to generate acquisition buzz.

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).

In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors. It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).

Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, firing Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom as CEO in 2007 and paying out only 1/3 of the potential earnout wasn’t the best idea. Zennstrom seems to be holding quite a grudge.

eBay is developing new peer-to-peer software to run the Skype service, they revealed in a quarterly SEC statement.

The existing peer-to-peer software is controlled by Joltid, a company controlled by Skype’s founders Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The software was not acquired by eBay in its 2005 acquisition of the Skype service and is now the subject of litigation in the UK.

eBay is developing the new software in the event they lose the right to continue to license that technology, but warns that “such software development may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive.”

Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is keeping tabs on citizens (article in Dutch) via their Facebook and Netlog profiles and their activities on eBay and other social networking sites.

Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos and videos from users as proof in case of a dispute, but apparently your lifestyle as you depict it online can prompt an investigation when it doesn’t seem to add up to what your official income is.

In the past we’ve written about eBay’s Skype conundrum, or the trouble the former has had to successfully integrate the latter’s communication capabilities into the e-commerce giant’s web services. In the recent press release announcing that eBay plans to spin off Skype as a separate company and file for an IPO in 2010, eBay President & CEO John Donahoe admitted as much when he was quoting stating that it’s “clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal.”

And now Skype is being downright disintegrated from eBay’s services, starting with the UK website. This is what the dry announcement message reads (emphasis ours):

(after the jump)

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Keith Rabois, vice president of strategy and business development for Slide, the social entertainment company.

On Monday afternoon, I was speaking on a panel at the Social Graph Symposium when the moderator asked me what eBay could do to revitalize its marketplace by leveraging the social graph. Dave McClure, like many pundits, presumes the social graph could be a great boost for eBay, if not an outright panacea. I replied, “nothing.”

It’s actually the social graph and similar products that have placed a stake in eBay.com. Most often, people blame eBay’s decay on factors like the weakening economy, the rise of Amazon, as well as eBay’s own inefficient search functionality. But the real and simple reason is eBay is no longer fun. Over the years, it has lost online ground and eyeballs to pure entertainment destinations such as YouTube and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.