Several more or less reliable sources reported that Cisco is going to buy Skype before the company complete the IPO process. If this is true, then Cisco will strenthen its leadership on the video and unified communications markets. This acquisition will also mean the synergy of corporate and consumer communications (which is beneficial for both companies and their customers). Moreover, the protocol of these communications - will be closed, which perfectly fits Cisco's strategy and will protect its monopoly. On the other hand, the current Skype co-owners (Silver Lake) are also co-owners of Avaya - the main Cisco's competitor on the unified communications market. And they are not interested in creating such a monster as Cisco Skype. But the supposed price tag - $ 5 billion - can be a very strong argument. Recall that two years ago Google was also going to buy Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.

Today Skype has filed an IPO registration statement and plans to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering. Along with the IPO application Skype has published some of the their business stats and plan of its further development. It turnes out that the company is doing quite well. During the first 6 months in 2010 Skype has earned $406 million, that is approximately 25% higher the previous year. Nevertheless, taking into account that the Skype has already more than 560 million registered users (it's more than Facebook), the company's management wants to earn at least ten times more. In addition, they are worried that almost 90% of Skipe's income comes from a single service - SkypeOut. Therefore, the major objective of attracting new investments is the development of new paid of business applications.

Skype, probably in order to recover its reputation after the incident with Fring, decided to do some good thing. This thing is a new version of Skype for iPhone. First, the new client (which works on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS) supports multitasking mode, and thus is able to work in the background. Now, if you wait for an incoming Skype call, you do not need to keep the application open all the time. Now with an incoming call you’ll see a prompt, like the one above. You can also open other applications while calling over Skype. And most importantly, Skype decided to drop the idea to take an additional charge for calls over 3G (due to “some operators starting to move to tiered pricing models”). But, unfortunately, nobody in Skype mentioned when the video calls support are coming to Skype for iPhone.

As we have stated, mobile video calls are becoming the next big thing, and it seems, that Fring - is too small company to compete with such giants as Skype, Google and Apple in this market. Last week, Fring enabled making video calls on 3G for iPhone users. This new feature has become so popular that within a few hours after launch, Fring servers couldn't stand to load and Fring decided to temporarily disable support for Fring-to-Skype calls. In a few days Fring expanded its capacity, but Skype support has not been resumed. Today Fring blog has reported that Skype has blocked these calls and threatened to sue Fring. Quote from the blog: "They are afraid of open mobile communication. Cowards".

As Skype CEO, Jonathan Christensen, promised last year, this world's most popular communication service is now available for developers as a "pure" service. Yesterday SkypeKit SDK was released. It allows any software and device to use the Skype network for instant messaging, status control, audio and video chat without the need to install the proprietary client. SkypeKit supports Windows, Linux and Mac. It includes the Skype's "VoIP heart" - Silk codec, which was opened for developers a year ago. However, the bad news is that SkypeKit can't be used by web-applications and mobile applications.

A couple of weeks ago we suggested that Google is going to shift the video communications market (and win Skype), betting on mobile video calls. Today we can accurately say that very soon mobile video chat will become a huge market and the IT giants will fight for it. It's enough to watch the Facetime (iPhone 4 video chat) presentation to understand this. Since June 24 Apple will start selling iPhone 4 with the front camera and video over Wi-Fi in US, and it's obvious that to the and of this year millions of users will make video calls via the iPhone, and Apple will become the world's largest mobile video chat provider. But it will be only the short term win. Then Skype, Google and other players will join the fight.

Video chat in GTalk (or more exactly, in GMail) has appeared more than a year ago. And we were confident that Skype will get the very strong competitor. Nevertheless, Skype's market share hasn't suffered at all. Even GMail users mainly continue using Skype for video calls. Probably, it's a question of a habit and Skype's great popularity. And perhaps, when Google adds calls to regular phones with the help of acquired Gizmo5 - this won't also change anything. Without offering some new revolutionary features, pushing Skype from the market will be extremely difficult. Especially now, when Skype introduced group video calling. However, it seems Google has a new idea. Today the company announced the acquisition of Swedish developer of VoIP and videoconferencing solutions - GIPS. GIPS technologies are used in Yahoo Messenger, Cisco WebEx and Lotus Sametime. And in addition, GIPS has created the best engine for video chat on Android.

Today Skype has rolled out the new beta version for Windows which supports group video calls for up to 5 people. Skype 5.0 beta is now available for download and testing, but with the warning that it may contain a lot of bugs. Despite the fact that the first official screenshot of Skype group video chat shows a boy and a grandmother, it's likely that most of its users will be business employees. Because as soon as the testing finished, the group video chat will become a paid feature. At the same time, there already some free group video chat solutions (for friends and families) on the market, for example, TinyChat, TokBox, PalBee. On the small business market there are also some strong players with paid solutions - ooVoo, SightSpeed and HP SkyRoom. However, everything will depend on the cost and quality, offered by Skype.

As you know, recently the U.S. operator AT&T allowed VoIP applications on iPhone to work over its 3G network. But the 3G version of Skype for the iPhone has not appeared  yet. Today it became clear why. On the Mobile Congress in Barcelona Skype with Verizon presented there joint project. Specially for Verizon Skype developed mobile clients for some Blackberry smartphones, and Android smartphones by Motorola and HTC (still Skype worked only on Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia Maemo. Yesterday Symbian was added to this list). These devices (with preinstalled Skype) will let Verizon customers to make free Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G, chat and monitor the online status of their contacts. It also allows to make calls through SkypeOut - but only abroad (local US calls will be banned).

First of all, 2010 will be the year when Microsoft becomes a strong Enterprise 2.0 market player. This year Microsoft will launch the commercial versions of online MS Office, Sharepoint 2010 with web 2.0 features and Windows Azure cloud platform, and these products will of course push ahead SaaS and enterprise Social Software technologies. Besides, we expect revolutions in mobile enterprise technologies and VoIP sphere.

Multiple sources (including TechCrunch) say that almost exactly Google has bought  Gizmo5 for $30 millions. If it's true, Skype now will get the very powerful competitor. Interesting, that month ago Skype was going to buy Gizmo5 itself in order to replace the Global Index technology (that was a reason of lawsuit) with Gizmo5 SIP-based platform. But now when Skype has after the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5’s strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. But, it turns out, that Gizmo5 has the strategis value to Google. And, really, it ideally fits Google's communication plans. First of all, GTalk can call only between internet users, but can't call PSTN and mobile phones. Gizmo5 will easily provide this opportunity to GTalk users.

Recently all Skype news are about commercial wars and not about the new useful features. Nevertheless, its popularity grows day by day. According to  exo.performance.network, Skype is not only the most popular VoIP service, but also the most widely used IM client (at least on Windows PCs). After chipping away at Microsoft's lead for weeks, Skype finally surpassed the MSN Messenger. And while Microsoft Messenger is pre-installed on large number of PCs, Skype requires that the user make a conscious choice to seek out and install the program..

Skype, that is struggling now against Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, has  two backup plans. The first - is to rebuild the back end themselves, and the second - is to acquire some existing technology. It turn out, that Skype moves in both directions. The company is hiring VoIP experts (like crazy) for their internal project, named Gecko. But this project is probably not progressing as quickly as Skype needs it to. Today multiple sources announced that Skype is in negotiations to acquire its little rival Gizmo5, that uses open protocols SIP and Jabber in its p2p VoIP network. The price tag is said to be in the $50 million range.

After the bad news for third-party developers, Skype exec Jonathan Christensen  hastened to make some remarks and give us a hope for a bright future. First, all plugins will work even after Extras close. Only users will not be able to pay for them from their Skype-accounts. But the developers will be still able to collect payment through other payment systems. Second, Skype is not going to kill the developer community and will soon introduce the next generation platform for them. And the most interesting part, is that talking to Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Christensen noted that third-party developers will be able to create new solutions on the top of Skype services. What does it mean?

It seems that the new Skype owners prefer a shock therapy. Today they decided to close Skype Extras - add-on applications created by third-party developers. Today there are few hundreds of these add-ons in the catalog, and among them Pamela (for call recording), Skylook (plug-in for Outlook), Yugma (web-conferencing) and others. For some developers it was a primary business model. The official reason is that not enough customers where using and paying for these extras, so it's not profitable for company to support this ecosystem.

Skype and Digium (Asterisk developers) announced the official release of the Skype for Asterisk connector. This solutions allows to integrate Asterisk IP PBX or Asterisk based telephony systems with Skype network:
- make calls to Skype-users from the common office phones or ip-phones
- make calls from office phones to PSTN and mobile lines all over the world at SkypeOut rates
- receive Skype-calls to single corporate Skype account (or SkypeIn number) and redirect them to office phones
- in the same way receive calls from your site (with the help of CallMe button)
- set IVR menu to your corporate Skype account
- log incoming and outgoing Skype-calls
- manage Skype services, like voice-mail and conferencing right in the Asterisk