The online auctioneer and the pioneering VoIP service could part ways within a year, if all goes well. Online auction giant eBay is planning to take plans its Skype Internet telephony unit public, with an Initial Public Offer planned for the first half of 2010. The move could mark the final chapter in eBay's (NASDAQ: EBAY) dealings with Skype, the Voice over IP (VoIP) service it purchased in 2005 for $2.6 billion…
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Business Software Alliance shows confessional videos of people, including a grandmother, arrested for selling counterfeit software. And now for something completely different from the Business Software Alliance. Traditionally, the BSA, a high profile lobbying and anti-piracy enforcement group for the software industry, touts major counterfeit software busts and statistics on the cost of piracy to commercial software vendors. But this week, the Washington, D.C.-based BSA is launching a very different campaign. The…
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In an economy that has seen IPOs disappear, Google starts a venture fund. What's next for Google? Quite simply, a search for "what's next?" The search giant this week announced the launch of Google Ventures, a new venture capital fund focused on helping young companies with what it described as "awesome potential." Google Ventures could invest up to $100 million over the next 12 months, the company confirmed in an e-mail to…
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Has Sun been holding Java back? In the beginning (1995), Java was created by Sun Microsystems. Then Sun saw that Java was bigger than just Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and opened up the process of building Java with the Java Community Process (JCP) in 1998. Yet now with rumors of IBM acquiring Sun swirling, the Java community could undergo its most significant change in a decade. There have been questions about Sun's…
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