• Read Write Web, Monday, April 13, 2009 11:45 AM

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold the company to eBay in 2005 for around $3 billion, are looking to buy the company back, The New York Times reported. Apparently, Zennstrom and Friis are now looking to raise cash to do so.

When eBay initially bought the Internet telephony company, "everyone waited to find out about some ingenious integration of the two companies," says Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick, but none came. Despite tremendous growth, Skype failed to innovate inside the slower moving eBay, which was ultimately forced to take a write down of over $1 billion on the company. Says Kirkpatrick: "we've got our fingers crossed" that Zennstrom and Friis prevail. In the meantime, eBay and the founders are locked in a patent battle over Skype's core peer-to-peer technology.

At 400 million worldwide users, Skype is twice as big as Facebook, but like Facebook, its revenues are puny (around $500 million) relative to its size. Nevertheless, RWW recently suggested that the voice over Internet protocol provider might be the biggest winner of the Web 2.0 era.

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