Skype's user base has grown from 53 million in 2005 to over 405 million today. The company became the world's largest long distance operator by minutes served in 2008 – accounting for 8% of all international traffic – and took in $145 million in revenue in Q4 alone.

But eBay has admitted that Skype doesn't fit well with its other businesses, and its CEO has repeatedly indicated his willingness to sell.

Skype's new iPhone app was downloaded more than a million times in less than two days, but some of the largest European and US operators have threatened to block the app.
Source: Telecomasia

The new search appears to have much more relevant results, taking into account the popularity of the story as well as the newness for “best match.” Other simple filters include “most dugg” and “newest first.” Compare that to the very old, not very relevant results you get now.

The new search also has a left sidebar with key stats, such as aging, how many stories with a certain number of Diggs, stories broken out by media type (news, video, images), and by topic.

OTTAWA, CANADA--(Marketwire - April 7, 2009) - DragonWave Inc. (TSX:DWI), a global supplier of high-capacity, wireless native Ethernet backhaul solutions for mobile and access networks, today announced that wi-tribe Pakistan Limited, a WiMAX service provider, is deploying its Internet Protocol (IP) backhaul network using DragonWave's Horizon Compact radio system. Introduced in 2007, the Horizon Compact series has established a formidable track record for delivering carrier-class performance in mobile 4G networks.

"DragonWave's microwave solution has enabled quick deployment of the backhaul network for wi-tribe Pakistan. DragonWave's advantages include high speed data links, true IP architecture, minimum power consumption, and zero heat footprint," said Mohammad Sadiq, CEO, wi-tribe Pakistan.

Formed in 2007 to provide broadband wireless access in emerging markets across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, wi-tribe intends to launch WiMAX services in Pakistan this year. The Horizon Compact is a small, 9-inch-square, all outdoor radio, integrating traditional indoor and outdoor backhaul functionality. It is used to deliver connectivity across mixed topology networks including ring or mesh architectures. wi-tribe can easily and remotely expand the capacity of individual links up to 400Mbps as traffic needs dictate.

"wi-tribe is rolling out world-class mobile broadband services, in its markets. The Horizon Compact will underpin their deployment in Pakistan, and we look forward to helping them grow their network quickly and efficiently," said Peter Allen, President and Chief Executive Officer of DragonWave. "Horizon Compact continues to reinforce its credentials as the IP backhaul solution of choice for next-generation service providers throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Advanced Ethernet transport features and radio performance have been uniquely combined to help service providers optimize costs and substantially de-risk the business case for mobile and fixed-line IP networks."

DragonWave products operate in both licensed and unlicensed radio frequencies between 6 and 38 GHz. An uncompromised product design delivers pure "packet" microwave performance with software scalable, ultra-low latency transport of up to 1.6 Gbps per link. Extremely easy to deploy and manage, DragonWave products deliver carrier-grade (99.999%) interference-free performance in next-generation IP networks.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts said Wednesday that Wright is departing to run Stupid Fun Club, a company Wright started in 2001 to develop new forms of entertainment like video games, movies and even toys.

"The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change," Wright said in a statement. "Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms."

Electronic Arts is making an equity investment in Stupid Fun Club, though EA did not say how much. Wright and EA own equal percentages and are the main shareholders.

Wright, 49, co-founded Maxis Software in 1989, and Electronic Arts bought it eight years later. He is behind some of the game company's biggest hits, most notably "The Sims," hailed as the best-selling PC game of all time, with more than 100 million units sold around the world.

But EA has been struggling lately and recently cut 1,000 jobs. The company, said Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian, has been very focused on controlling costs, so the latest news reflects EA's direction.

Sebastian called Wright a very talented developer, but noted that his games tend to take a long time to create. He estimates that "Spore," which took several years, cost somewhere between $30 million and $40 million.

"Spore," launched last fall, is an extremely ambitious game that lets players create an evolving universe, from single-celled organisms to civilizations capable of intergalactic travel. The game has sold 2 million copies so far, which might make it somewhat of a disappointment to EA, noted Sebastian, though he added that the company also has a long-term view of the franchise.

The arrangement with Wright frees EA from putting a lot of financial resources behind him but lets the company share in the benefits of whatever Stupid Fun Club may produce. EA will hold rights to develop games that come from the company. It also frees up Wright to pursue his interests beyond just video games.

The company's vice president of engineering made the comments during a wide-ranging discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

"We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business," said Vic Gundotra.
SearchEngineLand editor Greg Sterling agreed: "If done right, it could be a valuable strategic feature for Google."

Mr Gundotra acknowledged to the audience that "voice recognition in the early days was a nice trick but not very usable".

There were early complaints that Google's offering could not understand accents other than American and that results were often garbled.
"Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it's amazing. It's working. It's reached a tipping point. It's growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it," said Mr Gundotra.
He declined to share figures about just how many queries the company deals with via voice search.
However, Mr Gundotra did say: "It's one of those technologies we think gets better with usage.
"We launched it on the iPhone and have seen a 15% jump in accuracy because, as more people use it, we collect more data and our accuracy gets better."

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do.

"The Skype for iPhone application will allow users to make calls to other Skype users for free if they are using a WiFi hotspot. Skype users can also call landline numbers for a fee, usually for around 2.1 cents per minute. The application will use numbers taken directly from the iPhone's address book, and will even display a photo of the contact (if they have uploaded one for Skype).

Skype, a unit of eBay, has made it known in the past that it planned on pushing its service more directly into the cell phone market, branching out from its traditional personal computer base. Skype currently offers its calling application to Windows Mobile smartphones and in January began offering a version of the software for use on the T-Mobile G1, the first phone in North America running on Google's Android platform.

Skype recently tussled with O2 and Orange when the two carriers declined to sell Nokia's Skype-enabled N97 handset.