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Google to Buy Skype?

New speculations around the Mountain View giant

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

3rd of April 2008, 10:59 GMT

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We've heard a lot of rumors, especially on April Fool's Day, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if somebody came out and said: "Hey, Google wants to buy Skype!" Oh, wait, somebody else has already done that! Michael Arrington of TechCrunch brought another rumor in the spotlight,

saying that the Mountain View super search giant Google may be interested in buying eBay's Skype. Since the speculations came out on April 1st, I really don't know if it's true or false, but there's some information which may really support the acquisition.

Skype may be a great acquisition for Google Apps, the suite of utilities which already includes popular services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. Moreover, it would be the greatest way Google could ever find to step into the VoIP market although it already has Google Talk and the 411 service. For now, Google Talk cannot be regarded as a powerful VoIP competition for none of the products on the market and tends to remain a shy presence in this side of the industry as long as the parent company doesn't focus more on it.

From this point of view, Skype would represent a very useful acquisition. A mix between Google Talk and Skype would mean both a powerful instant messaging solution and high-end VoIP technology supposed to let people communicate on the web by voice.

Besides this, Skype could be integrated into Gmail, just like Google Talk already is. This way, people would be able to use Skype straight from the mail's interface without the need of downloading and installing the program. I don't know if this is possible, but I would happily use such a service.

However, we can't speculate too much because nobody knows for sure if it was only an April Fool's Day prank or pure reality. I think we'll have to wait a little bit to find out the truth.

TAGS:

skype | google | google talk | voip

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