At first glance, auction giant eBay and net phone firm Skype seem to have little in common apart from the fact that both do almost all of their business online.

I figured Google would have picked up Skype. Screw first glance, this does seem strange. It seems like a big stretch out of eBay's space. The deal was worth $2.6 billion. They couldn't have built what Skype has for a fraction of that? That seems like an insane valuation. The Skype name isn't worth that much. 53 million users isn't worth that much to someone who already has 100 million users and a $51 billion market cap. Skype must have something else going on in development we don't know about. To put this in perspective, the deal for Paypal was only valued at $1.5 billion.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Portal bid drives eBay Skype deal