FreedomPop is an upcoming startup that was founded by Niklas Zennstrom. Zennstrom is best known for co-founding services like KaZaa, Skype, and Rdio. FreedomPop i sa company that plans to offer free basic wireless services for laptops and smartphones. FreedomPop is testing their service with a selected group of U.S. users and they plan to launch next year.

Rdio is an ad-free music subscription service that is available as a website and has iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone applications.

A few days ago I wrote about how Google and Facebook were in talks to form a partnership with Skype. Looks like those talks have ended because Microsoft is going to acquire Skype Technologies Inc. for between $7-$8 billion according to several sources. Including the long-term debt associated with Skype, the deal is worth about $8.5 billion. This would be Microsoft’s largest acquisition since Yahoo! turned down the $48 billion offer.

Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, has raised $42 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Atomico. Atomico co-founder Niklas Zennström will be joining the board of directors at Rovio. Angry Birds was one of the most download games on the Apple App Store and on Google Android. After that investors were begging to put money in their company.

The entrepreneur dynamic duo Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström has officially launched the Rdio service to the public. You may remember Janus and Niklas as the two who started KaZaa, Skype, and Joost. Up until today, you needed an invitation to use the service. The music streaming service starts at a cost of $4.99 per month. However the service is currently open to users in the U.S. and Canada.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström are two of the most popular entrepreneurs as they started KaZaa, Skype, and Joost. Their latest venture is a Twitter-like digital music service called Rdio.com.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype started a company called Atomico Ventures in 2006. The VC firm was started to invest in early-stage European technology companies. Atomico has just announced that they have raised $165 million in funding.

“The type of companies we are looking at are consumer-facing and also small business… that do not need to build up sales forces around the world to scale and grow,” stated Zennström in an interview with the Financial Times. “These are the kinds of companies like Skype, Google and Facebook who, if the business model is really working, they can get large revenues without having to go through too many financing rounds.” [Financial Times]

As you may remember, two months ago eBay was planning to spin Skype into an independent company. The buyers who would take control of Skype from eBay included Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Index Ventures, and Silver Lake. However the founders of Skype interrupted the sale by claiming intellectual property infringement on the VoIP technology. The original founders of Skype started a company called Joltid. And Joltid said that they were suing eBay.

The lawsuit has now been settled. eBay will be selling a majority ownership of Skype to the aforementioned investors for $2 billion. Joltid will be licensing the technology to the new Skype buyers. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis will get 14% ownership in Skype as a result. Both Friis and Zennstrom will also make a “significant’ investment in Skype too. eBay will retain 30% in Skype and the rest of the investor group will get 56%.

Friis and Zennstrom also filed a lawsuit back in September against former Joost CEO Mike Volpi. Friis and Zennstrom founded Joost several years ago and sued Volpi because of breach of fiduciary duty. Volpi is currently a partner with Index Ventures which is one of the companies buying Skype. As a result, Index Ventures is no longer one of the buyers in Skype. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of this year.