31–40 of 64 posts
Andreessen was an investor in Qik. Andreessen did a huge deal to buy Skype. Andreessen is an investor in Facebook AND on the board. He sold Qik to Skype for $100M and now he's going to sell Skype to Facebook for billions? "No conflict, no interest" indeed.
Dave Chappelle had a sketch where he was defending Michael Jackson despite mounting evidence implicating him in child molestation. Chappelle's defense was "but .. he made Thriller!"
But .. he wrote Mosaic!
skype is only a good option if they want users. because the only appeal of skype is the userbase. really. if facebook has the penetration everyone believes they have, skype would be irrelevant. buy any other media streaming company with an actual decent codec and the rest is commodity.
If logged in to skype meant logged in to facebook I would become a very active facebook user.
I can't gauge the value of that to facebook because it's still not entirely clear how they make money (at least not the kind of money investors are aiming for), but it's possible skype is very valuable. Who I call, how long, what hours, these all tell facebook a lot about me. Possibly more than my facebook account does.
Different people use facebook for different things. Photo sharing, address book, networking, chat, email (sort of), social news, games. Skype can add another big bullet point to that list.
Again, it's hard to say good or bad for facebook's bottom line at this point. If you are going by their current revenue model, you would have to relate everything to demographically segmented pageviews but these kind of numbers assume bigger value than that.
I don't fancy Facebook buying Skype.
In the event of this actually happening, what are some alternatives to Skype's video chat?
I've personally been looking into this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi has anyone tried it? What do you think? I haven't gotten it to work yet,,,
The most reliable VoIP program I've found is twinkle, but it hasn't been updated in years afaik. I used Ekiga exclusively for SIP and video chat for several months but it was plagued with really annoying bugs, including frequent hard locks and unreliable presence/call functionalities.
I haven't been impressed with any Linux SIP/video chat applications to be honest. Empathy and Pidgin use gstreamer which usually doesn't work very well either. The most reliable video chat experience I've had is Skype, despite their buggy Linux client.
* Why Facebook will buy Skype
* This is not a bubble
* Facebook buying Skype is the dumbest thing ever
* Skype's two hundred competitors that Google will buy
* That settles it, we're in a bubble
* Why Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple should buy Skype
* How I flipped my VOIP company for $4 billion in funny-moneyAndreessen was an investor in Qik. Andreessen did a huge deal to buy Skype. Andreessen is an investor in Facebook AND on the board. He sold Qik to Skype for $100M and now he's going to sell Skype to Facebook for billions? "No conflict, no interest" indeed.
(IANAL, TINLA etc)
In the event of this actually happening, what are some alternatives to Skype's video chat?
- Open standard
- Supports federation between different servers
- Open source cllients available
- Also integrated into GMail (that's the technology that is used when you do a voice or video call)
- Will be fully integrated into Android starting with version 2.3.4