At the beginning of the month, eBay announced that they would be selling Skype to several buyers. The buyers included Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. That sale has been interrupted not by Kanye West, but by the founders of Joost and Skype.

The founders of Joost and Skype started another company called Joltid. Joltid is suing eBay on the basis that Skype is infringing on their technology at least $100,000 times per day. eBay denies the allegations. But Joltid co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom says that their company holds the intellectual property rights to VoIP applications including Skype. Joltid filed the lawsuit against eBay two weeks after the announcement was made that Skype would be sold to the aforementioned buyers.

Today another lawsuit was filed by the Joltid, Skype, and Joost co-founders. Zennstrom and Friis filed a lawsuit against former Joost CEO and Chairman Mike Volpi along with venture capital firm Index Ventures. The lawsuit states that there has been a breach of “fiduciary duty against Volpi, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty against Index, interference with prospective business advantage, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract against Index, breach of confidence, and civil conspiracy.” Volpi had recently quit Joost to join Index Ventures back in July.

Between Index being sued and wanting to buy Skype from eBay, that company is up the creek made out of you know what with no oar. I also think it is safe to say that Friis and and Zennström don’t want to see Index own the company that they built and sold to eBay. Who knows? Maybe the purchase of Skype might be too much of a headache and might the transaction may be aborted. But all the buyers involved have already come to far and won’t go down without a fight.

Stribe has a business model that will sound very familiar to everyone, creating a customized social network platform around your website. There are a few small start-ups here and there that will offer such a service for a chunk of change, but Stribe is making it free. Stribe says that they are unique because the social network will be built around your website with your own branding. Most other services have their brand and are a website set up under your website’s name. IMHO social networks were really hot a few years ago, but that trend is starting to lose its flair.

As a matter of fact a lot of companies are shutting down their social network services (*cough Yahoo!*). However Stribe prides itself on their strength of making it easy to integrate the service instantly on a website. The Stribe toolbar appears at the bottom of websites similar to Meebo’s toolbar. However Meebo is more about chatting and Stribe is more about comments, members, and chat.

Stribe is customizable and the toolbar can be moved around if you please. The colors can be changed around too. People who join the Stribe community through your website become a permanent Stribe members so that they can communicate on other Stribe-powered website toolbars. Stribe will charge about $10-$50 for premium accounts. The company is led by CEO Kamel Zeroual and CTO Gael Delalleau. Stribe is based in Paris, France and has about $600,000 in funding. The company demonstrated their product at the TechCrunch50 conference.

As you may recall, the Google Voice and Google Latitude applications were never accepted into the Apple App Store. Tensions rose between both companies ever since and Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple Board of Directors.  Even the FCC probed into the reasoning behind why the applications were never approved.  The FCC sent letters to AT&T, Google, and Apple.  Apple made their letters public, but Google asked the FCC to keep their responses confidential…. until today.

Google just made the letter public about why Apple never accepted their applications.  Before Google asked the FCC to keep Question #2 private.  Below is Google’s answer to that question.  The letter was made public Richard Whitt of the Washington Telecom and Media Counsel.

The Whuffie Bank is a new non-profit service focused on rewarding people for social media participation. The business model of The Whuffie Bank was inspired by Creative Commons. One of the fundamental flaws of Creative Commons contributors is that a lot of them are not financially rewarded. The Whuffie Bank wants to offer Twitter retweeters and Facebook users that share content virtual or physical goods for their efforts. The more Whuffies you have in your bank, the bigger the prizes you receive.

The Whuffie Bank will monitor how many people retweet your content and how many people “like” your Facebook links. Whuffie Bank will also monitor your comments on various blog posts. The Whuffie Bank’s algorithm will also monitor who retweets or likes your Facebook links to make sure they are not spam bots. The Whuffie Bank will also allow you to reward Whuffies to others as payment for services.

The term Whuffie was coined by author Cory Doctorow. The Whuffie Bank was started by Santiago Siri, Martin Añazco, Martin Conte Mac Donell, Diego Meller, and Emiliano Kargieman. The Whuffie Bank is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Whuffie Bank demonstrated their service at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Microsoft Corporation co-founder Paul Allen founded another company called Vulcan Spectrum LLC. In an auction by the FCC in December 2007, Vulcan Spectrum bought 700MHz spectrum space. But now he decided to sell a large chunk of the spectrum to AT&T, more specifically in sections of Oregon and Washington. AT&T is not disclosing the financial details about the transaction, but AT&T spokesman Michael Coe revealed that the company is making the purchase to meet customer demand and support the transition to LTE.

AOL bought Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company in February 2007. The price was not disclosed, but rumor has it that they paid about $80 million. Third Screen Media was rolled into AOL’s Platform-A division, the same unit that runs Advertising.com and PubAccess. Now there is another rumor floating around that Third Screen Media is not making as much money as they had hoped so they’ll end up scaling back the service or shut it down completely.

Rather than focusing on brokering advertising on mobile devices, AOL has strength in building mobile content. According to Silicon Alley Insider, they have heard from mobile industry insiders that AOL is not renewing deals with publishers. AOL is losing customers and is focusing more on internal properties. Many Third Screen Media employees have also supposedly been applying to other jobs.

Before being acquired by AOL, Third Screen Media raised $8 million from TD Capital Ventures and Blue Chip Venture Company. During the time of the acquisition, Microsoft was rumored to be involved with bidding for Third Media also.

Sayonara i-Mate, it was nice knowing you. The mobile phone company that built Windows Mobile smartphones has closed their doors for good. Around March 2008 i-Mate laid off their entire staff in the U.S. and yesterday all the employees at the Dubai Internet City location were told that the company will have to shut down indefinitely. i-Mate was delisted from all of the stock markets already. The company shut down in the midst of shipping the i-Mate 810-F mobile phone (pictured above).

Initially the employees at the Dubain Internet City office were told to take a two month unpaid leave and then one day later they were told the company was shutting down. The company was unable to make deliveries or do any sort of business. The 810-F device was launched this past February. One retailer was expecting a delivery of the phones, but they never showed up. Now we know why. The company tried to restructure management a few months ago along with sales channels and distribution, but clearly all efforts have failed.

Several publications have received test units of the HTC Hero and reviews have been flying around to-and-fro. Navigation of the operating system is controlled by a white tracking ball towards the bottom of the phone. The buttons are also integrated into the metallic base of the phone.

The camera in the phone is 5 megapixel which allows you to take high-resolution photos while you’re on the go. This is an awesome feature to have when sending TwitPics of things you want to show your followers. The phone also runs on Sprint’s 3G network. The Hero won’t be able to run on AT&T or T-Mobile because it does not have a SIM card slot. For memory expansion, there is a microSD card slot.

The phone kit also has an NFL widget which is exclusive for Sprint. The phone also has a couple of NASCAR apps and the Sprint Navigator feature. The phone does not come with the Sprint TV icon on the homepage. But the Amazon MP3 store icon shows up on the homepage. CrunchGear reported that browsing e-mail was a breeze, but tethering systems are disabled on the phone.

The camera and camcorder are pretty standard but the autofocus works very well. The phone also handles contacts very well. The Palm Pre struggles to absorb over 100 contacts from Google and Facebook, but the Hero had no issue absorbing 300+ contacts for CrunchGear editor John Biggs. The phone runs on the Google Android operating system and costs about $180 when signing a 2 year contract with Sprint.