The next big dot-com deal could be in the works amid reports that Time-Warner is talking to Microsoft about selling a stake in AOL to the software giant. Maybe my prediction of a dot-com buying spree will happen sooner rather than later. If Microsoft and Time-Warner do strike an agreement, it would be deliciously ironic given a potential deal in 1992 fell apart after a disastorous meeting between Bill Gates and Steve Case. Apparently, Gates opened the meeting by saying "I can buy 20% of you or I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you.". This prompted Case to quickly respond "This company is not for sale". And the rest was history....
Update: According to Bloomberg News, Merrill Lynch analyst Luaren Rich Fine believes Google could acquire AOL.

What a difference a year makes. Last August, there were many "smart" investors who balked at buying into Google's IPO in which 19.6 million shares were sold at $85 each. Yesterday, Google easily sold 14.1 million shares at $295 a share to raise a cool $4.15 billion. Of course, a year ago no one would have dreamed eBay would have forked over $4.1-billion for Skype or that Rupert Murdoch would go on a dot-com buying spree. As I wrote yesterday, there's a whole new dot-com bubble happening that could see the AOL/Time-Warner merger surpassed. Is a Google-eBay deal or Microsoft-eBay or Microsoft-Google or Google-Amazon possible? Given eBay's audacious acquisition, anything seems possible.

iLocus has issued its sixth annual VOIP report that includes flurry of statistic tidbits. Among the highlights are that service providers carried 342.7 billion minutes of VOIP traffic from July 2004 to June 2005. Of these minutes, 77.7 billion were local calls, 209.4 billion were national LD and 55.6 billion were international LD. Of the international calls, VOIP represented 25% to 30% of the overall international total worldwide.
In terms of consumer VOIP, iLocus reports Japan has the highest number with 6.43 million subscribers, followed by 2.24 million in the U.S. Canada ranked 10th with 130,000 customers (this does not reflect Videotron's strong growth recently). The Japanese numbers are skewed because VOIP is a standard feature for Yahoo! Japan customers.
Some other good news for Canada was the fact Nortel Networks is the top seller of Class 5 softswitches with 26.5% while Siemens had 20.3%. Sonus leads the class 4 softswitch market with 25.5% share while Nortel has 24.3%.

If you look at the $4.1-billion eBay-Skype deal, it doesn't make much sense other than an expensive foray into the pay-per-call world. eBay CEO Meg Whitman talked a lot on the post-deal conference call about using Skype to offer PPCall to eliminate "friction" between buyers and sellers - while eBay could make more revenue by offering it a core service offering. The Kelsey Group believes PPCall has the potential to be worth $4-billion by 2009 - a development that could begin to justify in a small way the astronomical valuation eBay was willing to give Skype. Kelsey CEO Greg Kelsey said the benefits of PPCall include:
- addressing millions of small business owners who relay on the phone for leads and sales;
- being less susceptible to fraud than clicks and more transparent to local business;
- helping "close the loop" in tracking offline buying habits.
eMarketer.com expects the U.S. online ad market will grow by 33.7% in 2005, before slowing to 21.2% in 2006 and 14.1% in 2007. The fastest growing categories this year are rich media (47.1%) and paid search (40.1%). Click here for a USA Today feature on PPCall.