e-Bay locks horns with Skype

EBay's plan to spin off Skype with an initial public offering in 2010 is being threatened by a legal dispute with the VOIP service's co-founders, who still own a key part of the software, states The Register.

Skype's founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have accused eBay of breaching a licensing deal and are threatening to pull the technology, which would disable the popular voice-over-Internet service.

In return, eBay is suing Joltid, the company operated by Skype's founders, in a London court to prevent the shutdown. The Skype founders retained the service's peer-to-peer sharing technology when they sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005.

The Indian government is pushing to modify unified access services licences to allow VOIP as part of ISP service offering, reports The Times of India.

Such a licence indicates that India is firmly moving away from a pure facilities-based infrastructure policy to partially-owned or non-facilities-based infrastructure in the fixed, broadband and VOIP service areas.

India currently has around 420 million mobile and 39 million fixed-line subscribers. This step is intended to facilitate an increase in broadband penetration, which has failed to meet national telecommunications targets year after year.

Mobile messaging service Nimbuzz has chosen Voxbone to provide mobile VOIP functionality without WiFi, so that its users can make voice calls to their contacts on instant messaging services such as Gizmo5 and Skype, says Into Mobile.

Nimbuzz detects when the handset is out of WiFi or 3G range and conveniently steps in, requesting permission to automatically dial a local access number and route the call over the Internet.

Nimbuzz can provide mobile VOIP in over 50 countries, with any Internet-enabled handset and no change in user behaviour.