what.com.es/next

In late 2005 eBay acquired Skype, the number one internet-calling company, for $2.6 billion. Today Skype’s price is half that one.

Yesterday, eBay confirmed that it overpaid for Skype showing once more that value never is equal to price. About half billion of the charge were to pay Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Skype’s founders, and other early Skype’s investors. Although it looks like big money, they could have earnt up to $1.7 billion if Skype would have met targets for users.

At the same time, eBay announced that Zennström and Friis will leave the company but while the former is leaving CEO post for a nonexecutive chairman post in board of directors, the latter will no longer play a role in the company. This situation leave both them more time to spend on Joost!

Looks like the mergers & acquisitions market is really hot these days. Following yesterday’s MyBlogLog acquisition by Yahoo! and StudiVZ a few days ago, today we find that eBay has agreed to buy StubHub, an online ticket reseller, for $310 million in cash.

StubHub was founded in 2000 and made more than $400 million in gross ticket sales last year. It offers a secure way for buyers and sellers to exchange tickets as StubHub acts as a middleman and includes money-back guarantee. According to Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America Marketplaces, it’s a perfect complement to eBay’s tickets business. What comes next? Only time will tell.

Recently we saw the acquisition of StudiVZ, an online german student community (facebook clone), bought by a german media giant. Now it’s turn for MyBlogLog that has been acquired by Yahoo!, as stated in MyBlogLog official blog. The unofficial numbers are around $10 million.

MyBlogLog is an online service that creates communities among blog readers who like to read the same blogs and so far it the latest step in the so-called Yahoo!’s “social media” expansion that began in 2005 with the acquisition of flickr, a photo sharing site, and continued with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, and Upcoming a calendaring site with, of course, capabilities to share events in the purest web2.0 style. Who comes next? Only time will tell.

A new startup has just launched to help people in the hard task of reading daily news. Daylife, as it is called, offers its users a new way to read the news with a wide variety of perspectives.

The service crawls the news from several respected news sites and automatically analyzes and classifies them to find out hot topics and top stories of the day, becoming so far a Google News’ competitor.

But Daylife also adds automatic relationships among stories, people, places and organizations giving its user the ability to explore the connections their own way. Furthermore, Daylife offers the posibility of having your own “world” with your selected topics and preferences with just a simple click on a little star nearby any kind of content.

On the other hand, Daylife lacks functionalities for community discussion, rating content or RSS feeds. Considering that the market is hot for mergers and acquisitions (remember yesterday’s purchase of StudiVZ), there can be a bright future for a service like that as long as they include all so-called web2.0-like functionalities. What comes next? Only time will tell.

Congratulations! An online german social network focused on students relationships called StudiVZ has been acquired by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a german publishing holding company.

According to Financial Times Deutschland, Holtzbrinck has paid €85 million (about $110 million) for a community of about one million users. That makes more than $110 per user!

Furthermore, the site is a shamelessly clone of Facebook, replicating not only their business model but also information architecture and design and graphical details proving that fast-cloning is still profitable in this new web2.0 bubble. What comes next? Only time will tell.