According to Tom's Networking, Linksys is about to unveil a Skype-only cordless phone called the CIT200. There's a Canadian angle as the unit will be made Richmond, B.C.-based Ascalade Communications, which recently raised C$40-million in an IPO. Ascalade makes a variety of wireless products such as digital cordless phones, VoIP phone systems, enterprise conferencing phones and baby monitors. The 2,000-employee company does all its manufacturing in Dongguan, China. Looks like Cisco is giving Skype's future a ringing endorsement.

Silicon Beat has picked up on the new and improved Google, albeit an unofficial upgrade. Google Total is more user-friendly by offering drop-down search options. If you're at Google.com, for example, and want to do a Froogle search, you use the drop-down menu rather than have to click on the Froogle link, which takes you to a new Web page. GT's inventor is Anil Wadghule, a 21-year-old computer engineering student in India. Silicon Beat wonders how long Google will let GT live. While it could draw traffic away from Google.com, GT does serve up regular Google search results with Adsense so it's not like Google will lose any revenue from GT's existence. The best part about GT is it was created by someone thousands of miles from Google's R&D army in California. It's one of those upgrades that makes you say "How come Google didn't come up that themselves?" Google HR might do themselves a favor and offer Mr. Wadghule a job upon graduation.
Speaking of Google, Hitwise reports today that Google had 59.2% of all searches in the U.S. by the major engines in July - a 14% jump from a year ago. Yahoo and MSN had 28.8% and 5.5% of the market respectively. Yahoo, however, had its local search tool used 4.4 times more than Google Local.

If you're interested in Skype and its future (acquisition, IPO), check out an analysis done by BusinessWeek. It provides a nice overview on Skype and the recent discussions that apparently took place with News Corp. The article suggests Skype will likely do an IPO because it needs the money to stay ahead of the competition. What I wonder is how Skype would use a huge whack of IPO cash to maintain its buzz and popularity: more advertising, partnerships, technology acquisitions to drive premium services? Another issues raised in the story is Skype's potential to generate lots of money from "advertising, marketing and the distribution of media", which are things I hadn't thought much about before. As for the $3-billion valuation being thrown about, BusinessWeek compares Skype to Myspace.com, which was recently acquired by News Corp. for $580-million. "It not clear how many corporations might be willing to pay that much for what amounts to an Internet startup, albeit a highly successful one," the article concludes. "MySpace, which has more page views than Google and features ads from major media and consumer goods companies, commanded a fraction of that amount." An interesting take on Skype's valuation is offered by abigidea?, which comes up with $3-billion based on 15 million active Skype users and an acquisition price of $200 per user.
For all the speculation on Skype's future, I wonder why Morgan Stanley, which has been retained by Skype to do an IPO or attract a buyer, doesn't just call Google CEO Eric Schmidt and arrange a meeting. Then, we could talk about how Google is going to take over VOIP.

If comScore was looking for buzz, its survey on the blogosphere did the job. The results were interesting but not terribly surprising: blogs are getting more popular (50 million unique visitors in the U.S. in the first-quarter), people who reads blogs tend to be more affluent, have a high-speed Internet access and access the Web quite often; and political/news blogs are the most popular category. The real excitement was sparked by comScore's traffic numbers (Freerepublic.com was the most popular with 3.6 million unique visitors) as some publishers were miffed by the ranking. Jason Calacanis, in particular, took exception to Weblogs Inc.'s traffic not being consolidated like Gawkers. He insinuated it may have been because Gawker - along with Six Apart - paid comScore to do the survey. The whole mess, which picked up steam today, has been dubbed comScoregate by Calacanis, who has made it a personal mission to tear the comScore survey apart. Aside from the ego/pride/hubris involved in who's more popular, which I guess is important if you're pursuing advertisers, the survey raised the concept of how to quantify a blog's popularity. Is it the number of links (Technorati); is it unique visitors (comScore); or some other harder-to-define factor such as relevance or influence or buzz? This is a topic that I've explored in the past.
Update: I just finished reading a great post on the log ranking challenge by Mary Hodder, who proposes the idea that relevance and influence should be part of the mix - rather than simply links into a particular blog. It's a lengthy read but well worth the time if you're interested in or curious about the blog search/ranking area.