No, Facebook isn’t building its own phone. But UK mobile service provider 3 is launching a mobile phone whose primary function, besides making phone calls, is social networking.

The phone is called INQ1. Its specifications? Fairly standard: a 2.2 inch QVGA screen, 3.2 megapixel camera, HSDPA, accelerometer, 50MB + 4 GB of memory. The platform that powers it was created by INQ Mobile, a company that’s specialized in mobile social networking solutions.

The phone is not available yet, and the details are sketchy; I was unable to find out what platform it’s really based on (I assume that INQ’s software will work on top of an existing platform such as Symbian of Windows Mobile), or which company built the hardware. What’s known is that INQ1 will provide quick access to Skype, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Last.fm, with eBay support coming soon.

This is all UK only, where INQ1 will be available for as low as £15 per month offering unlimited free Facebook, Skype, Windows Live Messenger and web access, as well as 75 minutes of calls to other networks, unlimited texts, unlimited email and unlimited free 3-to-3 calls.

Is this a revolutionary device? No. It’s pure marketing: the iPhone can probably do everything INQ1 can and possibly more. But it shows that social networking has become the buzzword in marketing circles and that we can expect practically every device connected to the net from now on to be touted as “social networking enabled.” Good news for Facebook, MySpace, and the rest; bad news for everyone who didn’t anticipate how big social networking will one day become.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Jangl Adds Voicemail to FacebookSend Facebook Photos to Cell Phones with MobimiiSend Facebook Albums to Your Mobile with 3GuppiesIotum Offers Free Conference Calls through FacebookFacebook Settles Lawsuit for Text Messaging HellFacebook Sued for Mobile Messaging. Seriously?LG To Release YouTube Phone with Direct Upload

Although eBay beat its downwardly-revised earnings numbers today, its earnings call was filled with glum news for investors. (Full earnings slides embedded below). After three flat quarters, revenues declined 3.6 percent from the second quarter to $2.2 billion. Free cash flow has been going down each of the last four quarters, and so has the total value of goods traded over the auction and e-commerce site. eBay is leaning much more heavily these days on merchant-dominated categories like autos than on auctions between ordinary people.

Even PayPal’s revenues were flat in the quarter at $597 million. Maybe the $945 million acquisition of Bill Me Later will help reignite growth. Its classifieds business (Kijiji) brought in a respectable $250 million in revenues.

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time.

eBay just became an even stronger player when it comes to online payments and classifieds. The company has announced two acquisitions today: the first one is U.S.-based online payments business Bill Me Later for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

The second acquisition is Denmark’s leading online classifieds site dba.dk, as well as vehicles site bilbasen.dk for approximately $390 million in cash.

Bill Me Later, as explained by eBay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, is complementary to PayPal. “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever,” he says. DBA, on the other hand, is another corner of the world conquered as far as classifieds go. “We are the global leader in classifieds with top positions in Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, and sites in more than 1,000 cities across 20 countries. The acquisition of dba.dk and bilbasen.dk gives us technology and expertise we can leverage across our classifieds portfolio to create better customer experiences,” said Donahoe.

Despite obviously not being short with money, eBay will cut its workforce by approx. 10 percent, which translates to about 1,000 employees and several hundred temporary workers. As they say, this reduction will “simplify and streamline eBay’s organization, improve the company’s cost structure and strengthen the overall competitiveness of the company’s existing businesses.” I bet it’s great consolation to the folks that are about to be laid off.

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NY-based Hakia has announced a relaunch of their search engine service today. Hakia is a semantic search engine which uses partial human filtered results to help get past the typical search results. Today the company is adding an even stronger human element: the "credible Web sites" index.

What this means is when you complete a search on Hakia, you can select to see only sites that Hakia deems "credible". The credible sites list will be vetted by librarians and informational professionals.

Hakia has also launched "hakia Galleries" which bring together all types of search results (image, text, credible, etc.) on a topic basis. It’s an interesting way to provide the data rather than for an absolute specific query.

I like the Hakia team and love that they are in NYC. But they have to start marketing the search engine. Get up to Times Square and setup a corner where you can show tourists why Hakia is better than Google. Let those tourists go back to their countries and spread the word. Sure I am simplifying things, but they have to raise the level of awareness to drive search volume. They don’t have a CEO who can push links to tens of thousands of Twitter users for quick traffic boosting. Booths at tradeshows won’t cut it alone.

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Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today’s acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO Gary Marino will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

Conference Call Notes:

John Donahoe says they want to focus this year on the following 3 things:

1. make ebay easier to use
2. improve product selection
3. improve paypal’s leadership both on and off ebay

We are reducing our workforce by 10% or by about 1,000 total workers. It will impact most parts of the company. We are creating efficiency while investing where needed.

John discusses the acquisitions of DBA from Denmark. He notes they own 25% of Craigslist. If you add up all of the sites that are in the eBay network, they have more traffic than Craigslist.

PayPal has a strong and growing penetration on eBay. Growth on eBay has led to growth off of eBay - one million merchants off eBay use PayPal. They focus on large merchants - 35 of the top 100 online merchants offer PayPal. 63 million consumers use Paypal. This quarter Paypal volume off ebay will be larger than on ebay.

BML (bill me later) and paypal belong together. we know the company and their unique capabilities - now is the right time to combine both companies. Bill me later is the number 2 online payments company. Bill Me Later brings 3 strengths to paypal:

1. a complementary merchant base to paypal
2. bml delivers a compelling consumer value proposal
3. bml helps paypal leverage its distinct business advantage - lower costs

We now have the #1 and #2 online payment brands. They believe that even with the market conditions, they believe this is the right time to bring the companies together.

Gary Marino, Bill Me Later CEO now speaking:

The more we spoke with paypal, the more we saw similar goals. He explains how bml works. They have a lot of risk models and can figure out if the sale should proceed in under 3 seconds. The appeal of BML is how easy to use - consumers like it apparently when they are in a rush.

BML typically sees double shopping cart size when using the BML checkout option.

They have re-engineered the credit model - they do not issue credit lines- they authorize sales one at a time.

Scott Thompson - Paypal President now speaking:

Bill Me Later is a lot like Paypal and that’s why it makes sense to come together. Discusses how BML has mostly larger merchants while PP has mostly ebay shoppers. Shoppers have more choice online now.

BML will help lower the overall transaction costs for Paypal. Paypal is available on 25% of all transactions on the internet.

Clearly their goal is to grab as much of the larger volume and transaction sites based on this call.

The acquisitions total 1.3 billion.

Stronger dollar has been a challenge for the company - more details on their earnings call next week.

Q&A:

• Bill Me Later will become part of PayPal. Gary is incented to stay. BML team is excited about the deal
• Expects BML to be on eBay by early 2009
• Paypal has 150 million accounts, 64 million are active
• valuation for bml less than half what it would have been a year ago
• biggest line item of cost for Paypal is transaction expense
• in 2009, bml and pp will interlink accounts with goal to have one signup process
• Skypte is 6% of total business

call has concluded.

GigaOm, one of the first blog networks to raise money, has joined b5Media, Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat and Paid Content (acquired), among others, in raising capital. Holdout ReadWriteWeb is said to be testing the waters and looking for a round of funding as well. This is something I’ve recommended against, and we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent.
Source:TechCrunch

On the Internet, nobody knows your site is a dog (to paraphrase the famous New Yorker cartoon). At least not yet. Semantic search engine Hakia wants to change that. Ask.com is not the only search engine rolling out a redesign today. So is Hakia, which is introducing tabs to its search interface. One of the tabs is “credible sites.” These are results from sites that have been vetted by librarians and information specialists (although anyone can suggest credible sites). So far, Hakia has built out a directory of credible sites around health, medical, and environmental issues.The “credible” results tend to come from government, university, medical, and news sites.

The “credible” results tend to come from government, university, medical, and news sites. For instance, here are the credible results for “green buildings” and “common cold.”

The idea is if your site is a dog, it won’t get on the list. While this white-list approach could improve the quality of results, it also seems way too easy to game. Any spammer can try to get their site on the truthful and authoritative list. And they will.Source:TechCrunch
big day for eBay and CEO Jon Donahoe. The company is laying off 10% of its workforce, or about 1,000 employees plus several hundred temporary positions. They will take a $70 million to $80 million restructuring charge around the layoffs, they said.

And they’ve made two acquisitions: Denmark’s DBA for $380 million and Amazon-funded BillMeLater for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

Regarding the two acquisitions: We covered dba.dk, Denmarks’ leading classifieds site, earlier this morning. BillMeLater, the larger acquisition, is a service that let’s ecommerce partners issue instant credit to buyers. You enter your birth date and last four digits of your social security number online, and it does a credit check on you in three seconds to determine whether you are worth the risk. Bill Me Later pays the merchant, and sends you a bill. The company has raised a ton of cash - at least $272 million - from Amazon, Azure Capital Partners, Chase Paymentech, Crosspoint Venture Partners, First Data Corp., and others.

eBay stock is at a 52 week low, we’ll see how it does in the market today.

Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today’s acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

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Diapers.com, was founded in 2005 by two new dads and has raised two rounds of capital, including a $7 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2007. The original investor group included Nicholas Negroponte of One Laptop Per Child fame. We’ve got word from a source that the company, based on strong revenue growth, has raised a new and much larger round led by Accel Partners. Yes, the same Accel Partners that invested in Facebook.Source:TechCrunch
first reported on this on September 18). But there’s one problem: while eBay wants to unload the business, they aren’t willing to sell it for less than $75 million, the price they paid for it in May 2007.

eBay has denied the sale attempt, but there are too many people who’ve seen the deal book and have heard Deutsche Bank’s pitch. The big question is, will it sell?

The “green” incarnation of travel, called ecotourism, mandates that travelers minimize cultural, economic, and environmental impacts as much as possible to promote sustainability. But while there are thousands of hotels worldwide that promote themselves as “green”, many of them are only partially fulfilling these requirements - they might not be wasting energy, but are paying locals at near-slave wages, or funneling money out of the local economy.

Whole Travel, a new site that launches tonight, is looking to keep these hotels honest while promoting the concept of sustainable travel. The site assigns each hotel with a score based on its environmental, cultural, and economic impacts, as well as its “customer interaction”, or how well it teaches visitors about the issues that affect their destination.Source:TechCrunch

eBay launched a new browser extension tool today that lets you highlight different products in Firefox or Internet Explorer and compare the pricing of those products on eBay. The tool also includes Skype functionality, which will let you click on a number in your browser and call it directly via Skype.

Dubbed Browser Highlighter, eBay’s latest tool will run only on Windows machines for now, but will eventually be rolled out for Macs and Apple’s Safari browser in the coming weeks.

After installing Browser Highlighter, a small icon is placed to the right of the address bar in Firefox or Internet Explorer. When you click the icon, you have the option of turning the “Compare on eBay” function, as well as the “Skype Phone Number Recognition” tool on or off. When either one or both are turned on, the information you search for in the browser becomes an interactive space to compare the price of products on eBay or make phone calls with Skype.