Will Facebook or Google Buy Skype After Talks?

While there have been rumors previously associating Google with Skype, Facebook with Skype and Skype with other companies in the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) space, a report from global news agency Reuters that Skype is in talks about either a partnership, or acquisition, with one or the other of the two is a little bit more concrete than previous whisperings.

If you haven’t come across it previously, Reuters is a global news agency that has built its reputation on accuracy and in business tends to be on-the-money most of the time.

The face of it

On the face of it, Skype and Facebook would make a good pairing, especially as Skype integrated with Facebook last October, with both companies boasting similar enough user figures of 600 million and 560 million users respectively, and an average of 124 million Skype calls every month.

There are another couple of things that might swing it in that direction although. Among them is the fact that Google has a whole range of business apps in Google Apps, as then as a reputation as being a provider of apps to the business community — an area that Skype would love to be doing better in as the majority of its users only ever use the free services. Google has as well got Android, with which Skype sits quite nicely.

Whatever is going to happen, it will probably have to happen soon previously companies other than Google, or even Apple, start looking at VoIP to fill the demand, and other enterprise 2.0 companies start going public.

In this respect, only this week, Renren — China’s answer to Facebook — went public, raising US$ 743 million in its first offering and giving it a valuation of $7 billion afterwards the first day of trading, on the back of the potential of growth in the Internet market there, during LinkedIn has as well said it is going public later this year to raise US$ 175 million.