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.

The U.K. High Court today ruled in favor of eBay, claiming that the company can’t be held legally accountable for the sale of counterfeit L’Oreal fragrances and creams on its online auction site in the U.K. The ruling follows similar decisions by Belgian and French courts, which have ruled in eBay’s favor in three of the five cases L’Oreal brought in 2007 against the company.

This is fantastic news for counterfeiters, who can now keep on duping customers into buying fake L’Oreal cosmetics through the popular web service.

In 1999 eBay was under heavy fire for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. Their policy approach at the time mirrors almost exactly what Facebook is doing now with Holocaust denial groups, namely banning behavior in certain countries to comply with local laws, but allowing it everywhere else.

From a 1999 New York Times article: “eBay…said that the company already prohibited the sale of such items in Germany because they are outlawed there. But he said it generally polices the sales of banned items only after receiving complaints from users”

From a PCMag article in May 2009 on Facebook: “We have recently begun to block content by IP in countries where that content is illegal, including Nazi-related and Holocaust denial content in certain European countries,” the Facebook spokesman said. “The groups in question have been blocked in the appropriate countries.”

By 2001, though, eBay had changed its policies to ban all sales of Nazi memorabilia across its sites. The ban includes sales of Holocaust denial items. The current policy is here.

Part of the balancing act eBay uses when making a decision on a listing is is to ban items which “lack substantial social, artistic, or political value.” It goes on to state “this includes items that may be deemed inappropriate or insensitive to victims of natural disasters or human tragedies.”

Editor’s note: The guest post below was written by Brian Lawe, CEO and Founder of MyStoreCredit. Brian’s company develops e-commerce tools around payments, cross-promotion and customer mapping. He’s been watching Twitter for some time.

The rumors are ripe that Apple, Microsoft, Google and News Corp are all sniffing around Twitter – but no one has mentioned the best fit: Amazon. If Amazon doesn’t jump into the arena, someone at Twitter ought to make a call to Jeff Bezos. Neither Amazon nor Twitter should miss the powerful synergies from merging the two companies. To wit:

1. Introducing Twitter Payments: Amazon has been struggling to gain traction with its payments platform. They will never unseat or even threaten PayPal until they come up with a unique and differentiated strategy. The world does not need yet another payment option. But Twitter is something new and does offer a smart strategy. By rewarding Twitter users for associating their Twitter accounts with their Amazon account, Amazon can instantly create a new, potentially dominating powerhouse in payments for mobile and online transactions.

Earlier this month we reported on eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon, a company it owned for a little less than two years. Ebay bought the company for $75 million in May 2007. Unknown until now, though, was the spinoff value of StumbleUpon. According to a source close to the transaction, it was $29 million.

New investors Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital joined StumbleUpon founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith in purchasing the company back from eBay. Outside investors put in 85% or so of the $29 million, we’ve been told, with Camp and Smith making up the rest.

eBay was paid $25 million in cash for StumbleUpon and retains a 10% interest in the spun off entity. $4 million remains in the company to fund operations.

While eBay prepares to unload Skype via a sale or IPO next year, it is busy looking for new ways to make money off its 405 million global users. They already account for an estimated 8 percent of international calls, and many of them are increasingly paying for SkypeOut calls to regular phones. Its revenues last year were $551 million, but it wants to get to $1 billion by 2011. To get there, it might have to start thinking local.

In fact, it has already started trials in Europe and New Zealand with Yellow Pages businesses that turn business phone numbers on the Web into free calls. Mike Boland at the Kelsey Group explains the concept:

After earlier reports that Skype’s founders were trying to buy back the company from eBay, the company has now released the news that it plans to spin off Skype as a separate company and file for an initial public offering. The IPO is intended to be completed in the first half of 2010.

As we reported earlier, eBay has been having trouble finding ways of using Skype across its other products (which CEO John Donahoe admits in a quote from the press release). eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earn-out due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

Last year, Skype generated revenues of $551 million, up 44 % from 2007, and eBay recently announced that it expected its subsidiary to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011. Registered users reached 405 million by the end of 2008, up 47 percent from 2007. Skype now accounts for 8 percent of all international calls by one estimate, and that number is going to keep on growing.

More after the jump

So StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that lets users browse and discover new websites by clicking a button, was a subsidiary of eBay for just less than two years. The acquisition made the startup’s founders extremely wealthy, given that they raised just $1.5 million in venture capital, and sold for $75 million.

You’d think that the founders (Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Justin LeFrance) would be quite content to go into semi-hibernation at eBay and contemplate their vacation homes for years to come. But like so many already-wealthy entrepreneurs, some fire kept driving at them to keep themselves challenged. It may be the deep rooted insecurity that leads most entrepreneurs to try to build companies in the first place - getting bought doesn’t necessarily give them the self confidence they thought it would. Or it may a simpler explanation - the certain knowledge that StumbleUpon hasn’t yet become whatever it is eventually destined to be.

So when the opportunity came for the founders to buy the company back from eBay and start over, they took it. The struggling eBay had been looking to sell off StumbleUpon for months, even hiring investment bank Deutsche Bank to help them get back their $75 million, but there were no takers. That left the door open for the founders to buy it back themselves.

Back in September, we reported that eBay was attempting to sell off StumbleUpon, the website recommendation service it bought for $75 million in 2007. That didn’t happen. And now the company has been spun off to start life over as an independent startup, backed by new investors and the original founders.

The new company is led by co-founder Garrett Camp, who now steps into the CEO role. Co-founder Geoff Smith also joins Camp in returning to lead the company. The company is backed by Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. David Hornik from August Capital and Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners join the board.

As the New York Times reported, Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are in talks with several private equity firms and are amassing their own financial resources to make a bid for the internet phone business. eBay bought Skype from Zennstrom and Friis for around $3.1 billion in 2005. We reported last year that eBay would be willing to sell Skype if the company couldn’t support eBay’s core ecommerce business.

eBay has been having trouble finding ways of using Skype across its other products. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

Are you prepared to have your mind blown? As expected, Skype for iPhone will appear “sometime Tuesday” and allow you to make VoIP calls to friends and family all over the world, a move that at once blows a great waft of flatulence in the face of the carriers and, in one smooth motion, high fives the international community of Skype users.

It should be available from the App Store for free.

Internet telephony and chat service provider Skype, owned by eBay, today announced a potentially game-changing move, opening up to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard for its VoIP services. As evidenced by the discussion going on at Techmeme, the beta program being rolled out by the company marks a clear initiative to target enterprise customers and open up to new revenue streams.

According to the Wall Steet Journal, the new beta software - uncreatively named Skype For SIP for Business users - is expected to allow employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls, which 35% of Skype’s customers are already using for business purposes apparently. The software will also give corporate customers the ability to receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites.

StumbleUpon is preparing to launch a shortURL service (a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs, like TinyURL or Bit.ly) in the next couple of weeks called su.pr.

Founder Garrett Camp announced the new service on Twitter without any description of what it might be on March 3. In an email exchange he says it will be a shortURL service to share StumbleUpon links on sites like Twitter and Facebook and that it will be launched in a week or two. The site currently redirects to StumbleUpon.

Digg is planning its own similar service, which we covered late last month.

Skype’s new state of the art speech codec SILK will be made available to third party licensees for free, the company is announcing later today. Skype GM Jonathan Christensen will be speaking about the new program at the eComm event in San Francisco later today.

SILK has been highly regarded by the guys that follow this sort of thing and is included in the most recent version of Skype for Windows (the Mac version with SILK will be coming in April). If both sides of the call have a version of Skype that includes the new codec, the call quality increases dramatically.

Skype is now making the codec available for third party use on a royalty free basis. There are a number of speech codecs available on the market today, including iSac and AMRWideband, and an open source codec called Speex. Skype claims that SILK outperforms all of these.

eBay is having second thoughts about how easy it will be to spread the Kijiji brand in the U.S. The company is testing out the name “eBay Classifieds” in two cities, San Antonio and Pittsburgh. A letter sent out to Kijiji members states:

We here at Kijiji thought it made a lot of sense to start using the eBay brand name. After all, we are part of the eBay family and we are a classifieds site…so “eBay Classifieds” just seemed like a good idea.

Maybe it also has something to do with the “j”s and “i”s blending together beyond recognition in “Kijiji.” It’s not just the name that needs work. The number of visitors to Kijiji sites worldwide was up only 7 percent in January to 23.2 million, while Craigslist grew six times faster and widened the gap. It ended January with 41.4 million unique visitors (comScore numbers).

After being “asked to rename Tweebay by a rather large corporate,” UK developer Paul Rawlings tells me he has decided to rename his Twitter marketplace Tweba. When I first wrote about Tweebay, a classifieds service that uses direct messages on Twitter to confirm bids, I wondered if “eBay might consider it a violation of its trademark.” The name effectively conveyed the idea that Tweebay was trying to be the eBay of Twitter, which was the problem. It was riding the coattails of an established brand.

Corkin is a new web service that combines classifieds listings with a set of social tools that the company says differentiates it from juggernauts such as Craigslist and eBay’s Kijiji. Like corkboards you’d find outside of local supermarkets, libraries and on college campuses, Corkin wants to be the website everyone uses to post free classified ads about anything.

Every aspect of Corkin has a social element to it; users can comment on listings, comment on photos, reply to comments, send direct messages, etc. and the company founders believe this makes them a better service than Craigslist, eBay / Kijiji and the countless other classifieds sites you can find on the net. The site sports the same spartan look Craigslist does (but including annoying in-your-face ads), and the founders of Corkin realize that they’re going to have to fight an uphill battle trying to beat them.

Yet more evidence that the future of media is digital (in case there are still any doubters out there). In a report released this morning, boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group estimates that between 88 percent of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next few years will come from four sectors: Database & Information, B2B Online Media, Consumer Online Media, and Interactive Marketing Services. In other words, it will be coming mostly from the Web. In contrast, between 2001 and 2007, only 33 percent of industry growth came from these sectors. The other 67 percent came from traditional publishing businesses such as newspapers and magazines (formerly known as print media—the report does not cover TV, radio, or outdoor advertising).

To the extent that there will be any growth at all in the publishing industry, all you need to do is look at the multiples paid for different businesses to see where the growth is going to be.

After picking the wrong horse in the Presidential Election (where she might have become Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain had won), former eBay CEO Meg Whitman now looks to be laying the groundwork for a run at the governorship in California in 2010. (The current Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, cannot run for another term under existing laws). Whitman today resigned from all the corporate boards she serves on—eBay, Procter & Gamble, and Dreamworks Animation. While she hasn’t formally declared that she is even exploring the possibility of becoming a candidate, that is the scuttlebutt.

If she wins the Republican nomination, candidates she could face on the Democratic side include former California Governor Jerry Brown (who is thinking of running again) and two popular mayors (Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles). If she hopes to stand a chance, she needs to cultivate more of a populist streak. Expect to see her on a lot more talk shows.