The fate of eBay-owned Skype has been in question for months now. Back in April, it looked as if eBay was going to spin-off the VoIP service as a publicly traded company. Now we’ve learned that Skype will be sold to private investors.

According to the New York Times, eBay will announce a deal tomorrow that will send the popular Internet telephone service to an investment group. It seems as if the group includes the newly formed Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, co-founded by Netscape’s founder Marc Andreessen. The deal terms are not yet disclosed.

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Overprotective parents are keeping kids indoors. Now technology can set them free.

Computerworld – The root of America’s health crisis is bad habits formed in childhood. To protect children from harm, parents are keeping kids indoors, where they get sick, watch TV and form lifelong habits of screen addiction, inactivity and junk-food overeating.

It’s time to tag and release the children. We have the technology. Read More

Above: CompuServe hit their high point during the golden age of 300 baud modems. Photo by Guille Avalos.

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When Ryan Block (our former Editor-in-chief) and Peter Rojas (founder of Engadget, Gizmodo, and RCRD LBL) announced last year that they were embarking on a new project together, alarm bells went off across the interblogs. Following nearly 12 months of rampant speculation, the duo’s hard work is finally revealed. Combining the best of social networking, forums, news aggregation, and wiki-based sites, gdgt presents a fairly awe-inspiring range of tools for the hardcore gadget lover.

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Are you bored with keeping tabs of your carbon emissions? NEC and BIGLOBE have developed a system that not only performs this odious task, but makes it “fun” to do so — if you’re generous as to what constitutes “fun.” A WiFi-enabled device is attached to your circuit breaker, where it keeps track of your power consumption and later transmits it to your home computer via ZigBee. The data is then sent to a website, where you can use it to play games against other green households in such thrilling arenas as Carbon Diet (users score “eco-points” with which they can purchase virtual soil, water, flowers and grass) and Carbon Ball, in which Dung Beetles compete to see who can travel the farthest, with distance being determined by — you guessed it — how well the user reduces power consumption. But that ain’t all — the system also keeps tabs on daily and hourly energy consumption, your rank in comparison with other households, and more. A three-month trial service is underway in the homes of 100 NEC employees, after which the companies will analyze the data and develop a business model for unloading this bad boy on local governmentand the private sector. One more pic after the break.
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