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eBay has given Skype one more year to prove its viability and relevance to eBay’s online auction service. Skype was acquired by eBay with the hopes of the VoIP company helping boosts its online commerce business. However, since its acquisition, Skype failed to live up to eBay’s expectation of bringing more tie-ins between Skype and eBay’s online payment system through call-billing arrangement.

Citing an interview with the Financial Times, News.com reports that eBay CEO John Donahue said that eBay is giving Skype until the end of this year to test its synergies and if the synergies are strong, eBay will keep Skype in its portfolio. For eBay, its not a question of whether Skype is generating revenue for the company but more on the question of whether Skype blends well with eBay and its other web products and services.

In fact, Skype has managed to generate around $126 million in revenues during the first quarter of this year, which is a 61-percent increase from previous year’s first quarter revenue. Profit wise, it is expected to generate $500 million and still manage to post a profit. But this seems to be not enough for eBay to keep Skype. It wants something more from the PC-to-PC calling service. And whether Skype can give what eBay wants remains to be seen. Skype has a few more months to shape up, before it finds itself lost in limbo or still with eBay’s care and comfort.

Read [CNET]

A Google PayPal competitor has been rumored for a very long time and we have good reason to believe that it will surface on June 28th as GBuy (as dubbed most recently by Forbes). Unlike Google Payments, which was integrated into Google Base, GBuy will be intended for merchants who have their own online store, but transactions will be completed through Google’s servers. Forbes quotes analyst Jordan Rohan, who says this would allow Google to “capture e-commerce transaction data, driving more precise targeting in future searches.” Rohan also believes Google will mark merchants who accept payment through GBuy as “trusted GBuy merchants” when they’re listed in Google search results.

Google’s payment system will tell Google which sites people buy from. If sites are ranked by relevance, click through rate and bid right now, imagine if Google could also account for how many people actually bought something. By taking this into account when providing results, it will save us a lot of time as shoppers and reward the merchants that have better products, a better website, better prices, or even more security.

Read [Download Squad]
Read [Post Bubble]