This morning, Skype filed with the SEC for a $100 million IPO that could be the biggest deal by a technology company since Google. Last November 2009, when Ebay sold a majority stake in Skype to a group of investors, including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, it was valued at $2.75 billion. Now those investors, and Ebay, who still owns 30%, are taking Skype public. When it happens, the VoIP giant will become one of the largest publicly traded Internet companies.
Skype is a peer-to-peer Internet telephone service that is free for Skype-to-Skype calls and has elected charge plans for non-Skype-to-Skype calls. The service has 560 million registered users, about 8 million of those pay for charge plans, and according to Mashable, it brought in more than $600 million in its 2009 fiscal year.
For travelers working abroad the Skype to non-Skype service is unbeatable. For example, a 30 minute call from Buenos Aires to NYC costs less than a dollar (2.1c/min). According to the WSJ, Skype hopes to expand its platform for business-related purposes, including its two existing business products, Skype Connect and Skype Manager.