Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category -

The big news today is of course the purchase of Skype by Ebay.  Plus, Google founders have bought a plane, as there is even more speculation of upcoming Google features.  CNN and Time plan to merge some key web properties while Oracle finally buys Siebel.  All that and more in todays roundup.

First to the big news – Ebay bought Skype.  It was only a few days ago when we first brought you this story when negotiations were supposed to be in the early stages.  Apparently that wasn’t quite the case as a deal has already been struck.  And already there’s tons of speculation as to the reason behind the purchase.  I haven’t fully thought about this yet, but I’ll let you know when I do.

Overall I think this is a great purchase.  Skype, even though not a huge money maker, has an incredible infrastructure which Ebay can quickly take advantage of.  It could be a great way to advertise for Ebay – continuing to offer free and cheap PC to PC and PC to phone calls, all the while heavily branding it and even selling advertising on the interface.  But that’s all speculation at this point.

I guess buying obscure start ups isn’t all Google is spending its money on.  Larry and Sergey have decided they need their own 767.  The plane is supposed to be getting refitted right now with a Google flavored interior.

In some other Google news, it appears that Google is now trying to index the contents of zip files.  This will be interesting should it work out.

Did you ever want to work at Google?  Well if you have experience in video conferencing you might be able to.  That according to an article on an Australian site.  Speculation is that Google will integrate video conferencing into their new Google Talk program.

In the last bit of Google news today there’s a very good post on the Google blog about some of the letters they get.  Its a great piece on how through using Google a father helped save his newborn baby some unnecessary surgery.

CNN and Time will merge their business and finance sites early in the new year.  The goal is to become THE premiere financial site on the web.  This is an extremely interesting move as both sites are quite successful on their own, so a merger can only mean great things.  Who knows?  Maybe this will be the first in a long line of high profile mergers?

My last bit of news today has little to do with search, but it provides an interesting insight into just how slow business can move.  Oracle has wanted to buy Siebel for years.  Well it appears that they’ve finally struck a deal.  Frankly I’m surprised they finally did this. Oracle’s stock has been taking a beating ever since the first failed takeover attempt.  But I guess in the end we can all learn something – if you want something bad enough eventually you will get it.

Well, that’s all for today, be sure to check back daily for all the latest news in the industry.