Cisco announced the appeal in a post to Cisco’s corporate blog by Cisco’s senior VP for video and collaboration, Marthin De Beer. In it, Cisco argues that the EU should reexamine the deal because Skype doesn’t work with other video and audio calling systems that use industry standard technologies, such as Cisco’s.

“Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others,” De Beer wrote. “Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications,” and so has filed the appeal. Messagenet, a European IP calling service, joined Cisco in filing the appeal. Both had commented to the European Commmission during initial hearings on the deal before it was approved.

Cisco doesn’t want the merger rescinded, but rather wants the EC to impose some interoperability conditions on Microsoft. Part of Microsoft’s plan with Skype has been to combine it with its Lync video and voice calling software for businesses. Both Lync and Skype use their own proprietary calling technologies, and so aren’t compatible with other video and calling services.

Sources familiar with the matter say Cisco had sought to work with Microsoft to ensure that its videoconferencing gear would work with Skype, but was unsuccessful in reaching a deal.

Skype has about 700 million users worldwide, and before Microsoft acquired it, had sought to go public in April. For calendar year 2010, it reported revenue of $860 million and a net loss of about $7 million. Successful mainly with consumers who like its free service, the company had begun to work on a strategy meant to bring the service to enterprise users, but had suffered some service failures that gave its target corporate customers pause. The Microsoft acquisition, announced in May, happened at just the right moment.

When the deal was announced, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Skype would, in time, be integrated with other Microsoft products, including the Xbox gaming console, Windows Phone for smartphones, and even its Hotmail Web email service.

Cisco’s videoconferencing business is a force primarily among large companies. It has 50,000 companies who use its gear, but it struggled to create a consumer-focused service, and shuttered its Umi product last year amid a wider corporate restructuring.

Microsoft wasn’t immediately available for comment on Cisco’s move, but I’ll add anything I get from it as soon as I have it.

Update: And here’s the official response from Redmond: “The European Commission conducted a thorough investigation of the acquisition, in which Cisco actively participated, and approved the deal in a 36-page decision without any conditions. We’re confident the Commission’s decision will stand up on appeal.”

Here’s the full text of Cisco’s post announcing the appeal:

Video to Video Communications is the Future

In the past decade video communications has moved out of the realm of science fiction to become commonplace in our homes, at work, and on mobile devices. Yet we remain some distance from the goal of video calls being as easy and ubiquitous as phone calls are today – across any network and between all devices.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union. Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined us in the appeal.

We did not take this action lightly. We respect the European Commission, and value Microsoft as a customer, supplier, partner, and competitor. Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.

This appeal is about one thing only: securing standards-based interoperability in the video calling space. Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as email is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can’t make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike.

Cisco believes that the right approach for the industry is to rally around open standards. We believe standards-based interoperability will accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment, and services.

The video communications industry is at a critical tipping point with far reaching consequences. Just three years from now the world will be home to nearly 3 billion Internet users, the average fixed broadband speed will be 28 Mbps, and 1 million video minutes (the equivalent of 674 days) will traverse the internet every second. As video collaboration becomes increasingly mainstream, multiple vendors will have to work together to enable global scale and broad customer choice.

For the sake of customers, the industry recognizes the need for ubiquitous unified communications interoperability, particularly between Microsoft/Skype and Cisco products, as well as products from other unified communications innovators. Microsoft’s plans to integrate Skype exclusively with its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype’s 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform.

At the heart of this opportunity is a question about the model for interoperability. One approach allows each vendor to decide how they will interoperate. Another approach aligns the industry around open standards defined by non-partisan governing bodies. The answer will be critical to whether and how quickly video calls become “the next voice.”

When vendors implement their own protocols and selectively interoperate, they push the burden of interoperability to the customer. We respectfully request that the General Court act on our concerns and for the European Commission to ensure the proper protections are put in place to encourage innovation and a competitive marketplace.

For starters, AT&T a few years ago started its own voice over IP service called CallVantage–but quietly shut down the service earlier this year. True, AT&T and other telcos have been seeing a rapid fall in their residential land lines. But that has more to do with people substituting wireless phones for landlines than it does with the invasion of voice over IP services.

Auriga USA analyst Chandan Sarkar this morning took a look at the theoretical combination, and finds the concept lacking.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Thursday’s episode of the show (taped earlier this month) is entirely dedicated to Skype, eBay’s (EBAY) soon-to-be-spun-off Internet communications service.

On the show, titled “Where the Skype Are You?,” Winfrey conducts video chats–via Skype–with people in weird places. Those places include a Canadian town near the North Pole, and from a submarine. She also talks to somebody flying in a Virgin America plane that offers Wi-Fi service–although Virgin warns they don’t allow us normal people to use Skype and other voiceover IP services to make calls while in the air (so that folks don’t annoy other passengers with noisy calls).

Winfrey also interviews Skype president Josh Silverman in a not-so-weird place: Skype’s London office.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

Before that event, which was at the height of the Web 2.0 fervor, the Canadian-born social-bookmarking start-up, which launched several years ago, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors (Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Shriram and others) who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

But rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by eBay (EBAY) have swirled around it almost since it was bought, although there was no sale.

The same has been true for eBay’s other purchase, of voice-over-IP service Skype. A recent report in the New York Times said its founders were also considering buying Skype back from eBay.

Under eBay, the site has floundered a little bit, but made some changes, such as unveiling a new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program last fall that represented a major shift for the online discovery service.

In that change, users no longer had to register for the service or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.

Terms of the deal were not released, but we’re digging! Um, stumbling!

More to come, but here’s the full press release from the company, as well as a video I did at the party StumbleUpon threw after getting acquired by eBay, including an interview with then-thrilled Camp:

StumbleUpon Goes Independent; Backed by Founders and New Investors

April 13, 2009 – StumbleUpon, the best way to discover new content on the Internet, today announced that after nearly 2 years as a subsidiary of eBay Inc., it has returned to the ranks of an investor-backed startup. StumbleUpon is now backed by the original company founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as a number of well-known investors including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. Camp takes on the role of CEO of StumbleUpon.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp. “This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web’s largest recommendation service.”

“StumbleUpon helps users discover the best of the web–it’s a way to find interesting content you wouldn’t think to search for,” said Shriram. “StumbleUpon’s personalized recommendation engine brings serendipity back to websurfing, and lets users sift through socially-endorsed content with a single click.”

StumbleUpon will remain focused on helping people discover interesting content by increasing the accessibility of the StumbleUpon service and the quality of recommendations. In addition, StumbleUpon has plans for several new products and features to be released in the upcoming months.