Whether they know it or not, Skype is suffering from a terminal disease. A disease inherited from her new parents, eBay and Greed. Skype is the VOIP creation of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, also founders of the file sharing application Kazaa and the new peer-to-peer television application Joost. Skype was sold to eBay in September, 2005.
Skype routes calls through other Skype peers on the network which puts an extra burden on those who connect to the Internet without NAT, as their computers and network bandwidth may be used to route the calls of other users. Interestingly, eBay has alienated these users by increasing the charge for a call in number from $38.00 per year to an unbelievable $60.00 per year. Discussion of this is widespread on various websites and forums that I have visited.
Skype has also experienced considerable popularity with some business users after incorporating features such as call transfer and auto redial, and the ability to add Skype to the company PBX. Perhaps eBay wants to concentrate on these business users.
Skype however, depends on the peer to peer nature of its service, and a mass exodus of many of those users could have a detrimental effect on Skype’s ability to handle the traffic. Make no mistake about it, Skype will lose users. When the rate increases 40%, alternatives, such as GizmoProject or VoiceStick become more attractive.
NetBank is going out of business. Most everything but the savings, checking and mortgage have already been sold and EverBank has agreed to buy the savings and checking portion of the business.
In a previous post, I mentioned that the pending EverBank purchase caused me to investigate other online banks. As I explained to one commenter, I have nothing against EverBank, if fact I have heard great things about them. One is that they are rated number one by Forbes magazine.
But that wasn’t the issue. I wanted to be in control of who my bank was, and just felt that I shouldn’t automatically accept a transfer to EverBank without at least finding out what other online banks had to offer.
EverBank has a relatively high deposit requirement to get their highest interest, and it is only in the mid 4% range. HSBC pays 5.05% on anything greater than $1. But they have a horrible billpay system. It seems that the system pays the bills you request, but you must keep the records of when they were paid, and when the next payment is due.
EverBank on the other hand has a Bill Pay identical to that of NetBank, at least as far as I can tell from the EverBank demo. I have therefor decided to use HSBC for savings deposits and EverBank, when the transfer takes place, for checking and BillPay. EverBank requires a minimum balance of $1500 for free BillPay, but pays interest at the rate of 3.35%, so is an acceptable trade off from NetBanks free BillPay and 2.5% interest.
Complicating the NetBank acquisition by EverBank, I suspect, is the facts that NetBank has missed the last two SEC filings, has been delisted by NASDAQ, and it’s stock, now listed on the OTC pink sheets closed today for 10 cents a share.
