ollowing eBay"s $4 billion acquisition of Skype Technologies earlier this month, eBay"s President and CEO Meg Whitman predicts that the price of transmitting voice over the internet will eventually come down to zero. "Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community," Whitman said about the acquisition. "By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the net."

Skype allows people to make free calls through innovative peer-to-peer software on their PCs. The free service is available in 27 languages and has been downloaded more than 182 million times in 225 countries since its launch in 2003. Currently, 59 million people are registered users of Skype, with more than three million people using it simultaneously at any given time. ... more