Microsoft officially announces the Skype acquisition for $8.5 billion on Tuesday. With this acquisition, Microsoft will bring Skype integration to Microsoft devices including Xbox and Kinnect, Windows Phone and other Windows devices. Microsoft also will continue to support clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

Skype which is currently has 270 million users will be a new business division within Microsoft with the Skype CEO Tony Bates as the president of the Microsoft Skype Division.

Read the full press release of Microsoft Skype Acquisition.

REDMOND, Wash., and LUXEMBOURG – May 10, 2011 – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) and Skype Global S.à r.l today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype.

The acquisition will increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities. The combination will extend Skype’s world-class brand and the reach of its networked platform, while enhancing Microsoft’s existing portfolio of real-time communications products and services.

With 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010, Skype has been a pioneer in creating rich, meaningful connections among friends, families and business colleagues globally. Microsoft has a long-standing focus and investment in real-time communications across its various platforms, including Lync (which saw 30 percent revenue growth in Q3), Outlook, Messenger, Hotmail and Xbox LIVE.

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

“Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world.”

Skype will become a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division, reporting directly to Ballmer.

“Microsoft and Skype share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers,” said Tony Bates. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s plans to extend our global community and introduce new ways for everyone to communicate and collaborate,” Bates said.

“Tony Bates has a great track record as a leader and will strengthen the Microsoft management team. I’m looking forward to Skype’s talented global workforce bringing its insights, ideas and experience to Microsoft,” Ballmer said.

Speaking on behalf of the investor group that sold Skype to Microsoft, Egon Durban, managing director of Silver Lake, said: “We are thrilled with Skype’s transformation during the period of our ownership and grateful for the extraordinary commitment of its management team and employees. We are excited about Skype’s long-term future with Microsoft, as it is poised to become one of the world’s most dynamic and comprehensive communications platforms.”

Founded in 2003, Skype was acquired by eBay in September 2005, and then acquired by an investment group led by Silver Lake in November 2009. Skype has made impressive progress over the past 18 months under Silver Lake’s leadership, increasing monthly calling minutes by 150 percent, developing new revenue streams and strategic partnerships, acquiring the intellectual property powering its peer-to-peer network, and recruiting an outstanding senior management team.

Other members of the selling investor group led by Silver Lake include eBay International AG, CPP Investment Board, Joltid Limited in partnership with Europlay Capital Advisors; and Andreessen Horowitz.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties hope to obtain all required regulatory clearances during the course of this calendar year.

About Skype
Skype is communications software whose purpose is to break down barriers to communication. With an Internet-connected device, families, friends and colleagues can get together for free with messaging, voice and video. At low cost, they can also call landlines or mobiles virtually anywhere in the world. Skype has recently introduced group video, allowing groups of more than two people to do things together whenever they’re apart.

Founded in 2003 and based in Luxembourg. Skype can be downloaded onto computers, mobile phones and other connected devices for free.

The Store basically provides both free and paid applications for various mobile platform including Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile. The store also provides apps for Java based mobile phones which means older and lower-end mobile devices. But unfortunately and as usual, it doesn’t support apps for iOS devices which probably simply because Apple doesn’t let it. In addition, it also has support for various kind of devices from various manufacturers.

Along with the Opera Mobile Store, Opera also launched Opera Publisher Portal which provides developers with an easy way to get their applications into the Opera Mobile Store. Well, it’s still a long way for Opera to get establish in this business considering almost all Operating System makers also already have their own respective apps store which of course provide a better way to access to the store from the mobile devices.

After the launch, some people said that iPad 2 may not be perfect. That’s probably true but it’s obviously still fascinating and could become a standard for tablets in 2011. Even the giant manufacturers like Samsung, one of those tablet makers that were called “copycats” by Steve Jobs at the iPad 2 launch, has been forced to reconsider about the hardware and pricing for it’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. And surely once again, the iPad 2 will reach another new selling record among Apple’s products.

A new report posted at DigiTimes recently said that Apple’s suppliers are targeting production of 10-12 million iPad 2 just for Q2 2011. Together with the 2-3 million units targeted until the end of this quarter, Apple expect to see as high as 15 million units of iPad 2 shipments for this year or 40 million iPads total sales altogether with the original iPad.

Apple’s target to take delivery of 40 million iPads from Taiwan suppliers in 2011 remains unchanged with shipment volume expected to top 6-6.5 million units, including over three million iPad 2 models, in the first quarter and to further expand to 10-12 million units in the second.

After producing 1.7-2 million units of the first-generation iPad in January, Apple began to phase out production of the old model in February, while beginning to roll out the iPad 2, according to component suppliers in Taiwan. Shipments of iPad 2 are expected to top 2-3 million units in March, the sources added.

It’s interesting to see that now the battle is not on the smartphone only but has spread to the tablets as well. Can anybody guess who’s going to win the battle?

[via: DigiTimes]

As you probably know that the iPad 2 will be available starting from March 11. The hardware it self will be offered at the same price with the original iPad, but how about the Data Plans? For those of you who plans to get the iPad 2, this info must be something that you really want to know.

In addition to the original iPad which is only supported AT&T, the iPad 2 now also supported by Verizon. According to AllThingsD, Verizon will offer prepaid monthly plans for the iPad 2, 3G version in several options: 1GB ($20), 3GB ($35), 5GB ($50) and 10GB ($80). Meanwhile AT&T is still going to apply it’s previous Data Plan which is 250MB ($15) and 2GB ($25). However, if users exceed their limit they will be charged $10 for additional 1GB usage with no contractual term.

Let’s take a look at the following table for more details.

Well, it’s all depend on your preference. Despite all these pricing schemes, the network support is also one of the factor that you need to consider. So, let’s wait in the next few days and surely we’ll see the official pricing scheme for this Data Plans.

[via: AllThingsD]

As predicted before, it’s just about the time for Android to take the top spot of the mobile operating system market share. The last data released from Nielsen shows that Android as an Operating System now holds 29% of share in US market, ousted iOS (27%) and BlackBerry (27%) on the first and second place from previous data in October 2010. With the Android still growing so fast and the release of Verizon iPhone few weeks ago and iPad 2 recently, it’s interesting to see what these numbers will be on the next report.

The interesting fact we can see from this statistic is that the Android didn’t take the share from the iOS or the BlackBerry as they had similar percentage compared to the data back in October 2010. As you can see on the chart, the significant loss is on the Microsoft Windows Mobile/WP7 which decreased to 10% from 14% from the previous report. Even the Palm/webOS has increased to 4% from 1.3% before.

Well, Android as an OS is obviously the winner but speaking of manufacturers, Apple and BlackBerry are actually still in the top 2 as they are the only ones producing and selling devices with their respective operating systems, followed by HTC and Motorola.

Another interesting fact on this report is that Nielson presented a chart of the OS distribution based on age ranges. And it seems that Android attracts young people (ages 18-24) more compared to other OS.

[via: Nielsen]

Nothing special on that page at the moment. Just one welcome post from the new team says “Welcome to Symbian blog from Nokia”. Please find the full text of the welcome message below.

Welcome to Symbian blog from Nokia

This site will be the channel for technology and business ecosystem members to find further news and information on our progress towards the new Symbian.

During the past few months a lot has happened with Symbian. The Nokia N8, the first Symbian^3 smartphone, received record levels of consumer pre-orders and has been shipping for several weeks.  At Nokia World in September we launched three further Symbian^3 smartphones, of which the Nokia C6 and Nokia C7 are also already shipping. We also confirmed our expectation to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 based devices.

On October 21, Nokia announced the focus on Qt and HTML5 for application development across both our Symbian and Meego based portfolios and our plans to deliver incremental software improvements to existing Symbian^3 based devices.

On November 8, the Symbian Foundation announced that it would be ramping down its operations to continue as a licensing entity for the existing Symbian^2 and Symbian^3 code bases. On the same day Nokia confirmed its ongoing commitment to the Symbian platform.

We plan to make the platform source code of for future incrementally improved Symbian releases available to the Symbian technology and business ecosystem. You will be able to find the platform code and details of licensing arrangements through these pages during Q1 of 2011. Until then, the Symbian Foundation will deliver historical information and the existing open source platform code via an FTP server until March 31, 2011.

During the first quarter of 2011, Nokia will review the existing platform documentation, wiki content, and platform development tools and publish relevant ones through this website.

I look forward to working with you on the new Symbian.

Petra Söderling
Head of Open Source operations
Symbian Smartphones, Nokia

First of all, the App Store now hosts 300,000 apps with 7 billion downloads and still counting indeed. These number of apps came from around 62,126 unique developers. You may compare it to 400,000 developers Nokia claimed joined their Ovi Store or more than 15,000 developers on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and give your opinion about how Apple could make much better business with that situation. Among those apps, there are about 50,000 apps in the books category alone which is 7,000 of them come from just one developer.

Interestingly, 33% of those apps are free while 50% of them are between $0.99 and $2.99, and only 1% are $24.99. The average price of all apps is $2.43 compare to what the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace offers which is $1.41. Not so expensive isn’t it? So no wonder people don’t have any problem to spend this amount of money for such a great apps.

So, that’s make sense that Apple is making a lot of money from the App Store looking at this chart. Well, i just wonder if there’s anybody make the same chart for Android Market?

[via: Fastcompany]

The QR term it self stands for Quick Response was created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994. This matrix barcodes basically contains any type of content such as websites URL, phone numbers, address and could invoke any app on your mobile phones. And if you scan this code with your phone you can record the contents easily and you can even share it via email, facebook or twitter.

Well, with around 1.3 billion units of mobile handsets sales worldwide predicted in 2011 and around 400 million of them would be smartphones, surely this kind of QR Codes Advertising will become a new trend. And of course the QR Codes will engadge mobile users a lot easier than before. Not just a website URL but also can be expanded to other businesses including Restaurants (Maps), TV Shows (Calender Alerts), Mobile Games (App Downloas) and Salesforce (vCards).

The earlier version Android 1.6 (Donut) used by 15% of the devices while 7.9% are still running Android 1.5 (Cupcake). Compared to last month, Froyo has made a big steps with 2.9% growth while Eclair slightly increased by 0.4%. However, this number will drastically changed as Sony Ericsson on Sunday has started the Android 2.1 upgrade for it’s Xperia devices.

Looking at this trends, the old Android OS will gradually migrated before it’s completely gone. So if your device still running one of those Donut or Cupcake, seems that it’s the right time to think another devices if there’s no upgrade available for your device.

[Source]

You probably know that @BillGates is on Twitter. And few days ago he posted an update along with a picture. Wpcentral managed to dig the EXIF data of the picture and found that it’s taken from a Samsung SGH-I917 which is Samsung Focus.

Well, no surprise anyway. But what makes it more interesting is the reason why Bill Gates chosed the Samsung Focus? Is it just because his staff gave it to him or it’s based on his personal judgements? But no matter what it is, Samsung Focus seems to be recognized as the best Windows Phone 7 device so far.

Now let’s take a look at this scenario. If we look at the other devices, all of them equipped with 1GHz processor so there’s nothing to do with the processor. The rest of specs left are screen, camera and storage. The Samsung Focus has 5 megapixel camera, not the highest as HTC 7 Mozart has 8 megapixel. And for the storage, Samsung has 8 GB also not the best as others have 16GB. So after looking at all those parameters, what makes Samsung Focus is so special is the 4 inch Super AMOLED WVGA screen and of course it’s physical body which is the thinnest and lightest Windows Phone 7 so far.

What about you? What do you say about Samsung Focus? Or do you have different opinions?

[via: wpcentral]