It's Official?!

Reuters just announced that the Ebay Skype deal is official at $2.6 billion.

Ok, so let's hope Ebay has some ideas for how it's going to use Skype that can justify the big price ticket.
They're banking on a lot of stickiness, or they needed to get to market very quickly. Either way, let's be optimistic and say that it could be the making of Skype or Ebay.

I look forward to being able to bid for SkypeOut minutes, and buy and sell stuff over Ebay directly via a call and a 'direct debit' of my PayPal account. Replacing the SkypeOut balance with the PayPal balance would be a nice development.

Seriously, though, Ebay has the potential to become THE way to do small scale commerce in the future. Many small firms already use Ebay as their 'shop window' and that will grow as the facilities (Payment mechanisms and Communication) expand.
I would say that Ebay's next acquisition shoud be a logistics company (UPS, Fedex, or UTi :-)

Exciting times ahead...