Lots of stories in the blogsphere about Skype, including its imminent IPO. James Enck astutely points out how many versions of the same report came up (picking up on Om Malik's own skepticism). Business Week, The Independent, the original Robert Cringely post... and the list goes on. 

Robert suggested that for a US$ 3 billion valuation, each Skype user is worth $150.  Is that realistic?  In my previous Skype valuation note, I wrote that an annual ARPU of $50 per user for SkypeOut would be reasonable, along with a guess-estimate of $40 for SkypeIn, for a total of roughly $90 per customer (assuming the same customers sign in for both SkypeIn and Skype Out).  So even for the paying customers, $150 represents 2/3 more than $90.  But wait - that was just for paying customers - and the key variable is figuring out what percentage of the overall Skype installed base can be counted on to regularly subscribe to these services (most folks are guessing single digits thus far).  Therefore, the US$3 billion valuation is huge!  So based on these arguments, I honestly join the skeptics list.  Skype might go public or be sold, but, in a "rational market", it should not be worth these huge multiples, unless I am missing something here (well, considering the recent action on search engine Baidu.com and on portal Alibaba.com, one might say: "it's the market, stupid!" and start wondering if we are about to get into yet another speculative bubble - to temper those thoughts, I recommend a good dosage of "creative destruction" courtesy of Schumpeter ;-).

Last but not least, Mark Evans also has a Skype story today, and he talks about what might be motivating the company to talk to Morgan Stanley and explore its options (including possibly an IPO).  He speculates on whether founder Niklas Zennstrom wants to cash in his gains now, considering the low barriers to entry or new potential threats (Mark mentions Michael Robertson's Gizmo service).  If one were to buy into this last factor, I would also add Jeff Pulver's newly re-launched FWD (including the pulver.Communicator) to the list (and Jeff has one of the very best brains working on this project, namely Henry Sinnreich, the father of SIP, who recently joined Pulver.com after having a distinguished career at MCI).  Another issue I would throw in the list is the fact that carriers will not stand pat (e.g. the BT Communicator).

I came across a good article written by Joan Engebretson on the hot subject of IMS.  Joan interviewed carriers such as Bell South and Sprint, and the discussions were very candid about the expectations about the technology and whether it can be the delivery mechanism for next-gen services.  For good measure, she also sought the opinions of vendors like Lucent and three analysts (including Tom Nolle, Tom Valovic and yours truly).  It was actually somebody from Lucent who pointed me to the article, and it was a great read.