Google gets married to Ebay who married Skype earlier this year !!

Well Google went one more step ahead on its conquest of the world wide web, it announced an agreement with Ebay that it will provide advertising for Ebay’s pages outside of the US. See press release on the Google site. In some sense this has to be considered a consolation prize as Yahoo continues to have the main chunk of Ebay’s business – the US business. On the other hand, in its ongoing land grab on the web, this must be considered another feather in the cap for Google – just more internet land for it to display its revenue generating ads.

On the other hand, it is not quite clear why Ebay likes this, other than the fact that it gives them a chance to play Google and Yahoo against one another and more importantly they obviously get a share of Google’s revenue. It must however certain to all the folks at Ebay that this move will not exactly be loved by their merchants – do they really want competing offers for “authentic antique red chinese vases” from Google (yes google has advertising for that – see here) for their own wares ? Probably not.

The Voice over Internet play

What makes even lesser sense to me is their play, on using each others voice over IP technology (yes, they both own it – google talk and skype) to provide another way for merchants (sellers) to reach out to buyers. It was puzzling enough to me why Ebay bought Skype in the first place. See Om Malik’s take on that story

I really don’t know what to make of the claim that Google and Ebay will either use Google talk or Skype for pay per call on Google’s ads which it displays on Ebay’s auction pages. This is after Google already passed on buying Skype. I am hazarding a guess that Google talk is about to either die an early death or is going to be seen in a Skyped up version soon, without having to pay the price for it ! It gets murkier … watch this space..

The world we live in

Not that I intended my very first post on this blog to be about such a morbid topic, but I cannot but help notice that every where I turn to there is talk about murder and mayhem. Just yesterday the authorities in UK, with the help of the Pakistani government averted what could have been the worst disaster the world has seen since the infamous 911 attacks on the United States. To cut a long story short – some guys, suspected to be British citizens of Pakistani origin got it into their head to blow up a few airliners over the atlantic ocean. Thankfully there were apprehended before the crazy scheme could go through, this time.. See more on this still developing story.

On the other side of my world, there is a Red Alert in India before the nation’s 60th independence day. They are expecting someone to do something – no one knows exactly what, but one can assume its going to involve someone trying to kill a bunch of innocent people in Delhi or Mumbai. The Indian government is on alert but is underplaying it, the US government has put its citizens on alert (read the official letter ). Wonder if the Indian government should put its citizens on alert in the US ??!! That would be a first, but does’nt it make sense? Is’nt the US or UK or any other country in the world as safe as any other in Asia or Africa? The world we live in is becoming a scary place…

Hello world!

This is a place where I will try to pontificate about things that I am thinking about, but hopefully also things that you are thinking about, and better still will hope that something on this site is useful to someone somewhere out there.