EBay Finally Sells Skype

By Dena Cassella Published November 20, 2009

EBay has completed its sale of Skype for about $2 billion to an investor group that included the founders of the Internet phone service.

Last week, the online auction site settled a legal skirmish with co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis which allowed the deal to move forward. The settlement gave Skype ownership of critical software that had been licensed from the company they founded, Joltid Ltd.

Recommended Videos

Ebay said Thursday it sold a 70 percent stake in the company for about $1.9 billion plus $125 million that it will receive at a later date. The company is keeping the remaining 30 percent stake.

The settlement means Zennstrom and Friis get a 14 percent stake in Skype. The investor group, led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz, get 56 percent ownership.

San Jose, Calif.-based Ebay Inc. also purchased senior debt securities worth $50 million to help finance the deal.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Haole built. O'ahu grown

Computing

It’s finally time to stop buying Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs

RTX 3080 Ti in front of a window.

If you're looking for a budget GPU, the general advice is usually to buy from the previous generation of graphics cards. After all, as the new cards take over the market, the older ones are still waiting to be sold -- and while they're no longer among the best graphics cards, they're still perfectly acceptable alternatives.

We've now reached the point in the current generation of Nvidia GPUs where that advice no longer applies. If you want to get the best bang for your buck, it's time to stop buying Nvidia's RTX 30-series and look for other options.
The RTX 30-series arrived at the worst possible time

Computing

Intel Arc Battlemage finally shows signs of life

In the last few weeks, we've been bombarded with reports regarding Nvidia's upcoming top graphics cards, but leakers have all been silent about Intel Arc Battlemage. Today, however, we saw signs of life straight from the source as Intel has included Battlemage graphics cards in its new media drivers.

As spotted by VideoCardz, Intel added BMG -- the shortcut for Battlemage -- to its latest round of drivers on GitHub. This covers an addition to the open-source media driver for the video acceleration API (VAAPI), which includes various codecs for video decoding and encoding. The column labeled as BMG looks pretty bare, though, with zero encoding support so far.

Computing

AMD is finally recognizing that Ryzen 9000 CPUs are way too expensive

The Ryzen 9 9950X socketed in a motherboard.

AMD is finally cutting prices on its Ryzen 9000 CPUs. After teasing that its long-awaited Ryzen 7 9800X3D will arrive in November, the company revealed that it'll be slashing prices on its existing Ryzen 9000 range by anywhere from $30 to $50 each. Combined with some impressive performance updates, AMD's latest chips have a better shot at a spot among the best processors than they've ever had.

The company describes the price cuts as an early holiday promotion, though it hasn't put an end date on the discounts. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X is seeing a $50 price cut, while the remainder of the range is reduced by $30. It's a clear jab at Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs, which go on sale later this week. Similar to the last few generations, Intel is undercutting AMD on pricing, so this promotion brings the scales back in balance.