eBay.com, who owns Skype, says it will do an IPO of Skype next year. This comes just one day after the news was full of talk about Skype’s original owners trying to buy it back from eBay.com.
Since eBay bought Skype, their reach in the VoIP market has exploded, and Skype now has over 400 million users worldwide. It should be interesting to see what happens now, but I’d bet money that Google will pick up Skype some time in the next month or two, and use it, in connection with their new voice to text and text to voice technology, to run google ads on the Skype interface, in real time, while the conversation is going on.
Think about the possibilities here. Say that someone is having a conversation on airline ticket costs to France. Can’t you just imagine Google serving up airline ticket prices to France while you’re talking? I mean, Google will know where you are flying from because of your profile and IP address, and you just said the words flying to france, so they should be able to pop up an offer within a few seconds that matches all your needs…
Kind of creepy, huh? What do you think?
