BigShinyThing

The Guardian site picked up the story from the Wall Street Journal with neither eBay nor Skype agreeing to comment on the rumours.

The paper claims that eBay is offering between $2bn and $3bn for the company. Skype is the market leader in internet telephony and has attracted interest from companies such as Microsoft and News Corporation. The firm offers free calls to other Skype software users and charges as little as 1.1p a minute to fixed line phones in the UK. It says that an extraordinary 51 million people use its free service, while two million have signed up to pay for connections to traditional phones. Its nearest rival, Vonage, which recently launched in the UK, claims to have 700,000 customers and charges £9.99 a month for unlimited national calls, with additional charges for international and calls to mobiles.

Skype’s founders are certainly channelling the Dotcom Days in their Vanity Fair feature this month. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are pictured in what looks like a Lear Jet (sadly just the interior of the Kingly Club, London). EBay had better start counting its pennies.

See also previous post: Google Talks.