The settlement did not come cheap. Skype founders Niklas Zennstorm and Janus Friis have given up a lot of equity, bringing their total stake in the company to 14-percent, in order for Joltid to drop litigation and to pass all rights to the questioned underlying VoIP technologies to Skype.

eBay will sell Skype to private investment group Silver Lake (among other investors such as the massive Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), among other investors.

Previous investor Index Ventures is no longer part of the deal. The fund wished Skype the best and said today, “Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria,”

eBay will get $1.9 billion in cash and other equity, valuing Skype at about $2.75 billion under the acquisition.

eBay will still retain 30-percent equity in Skype. eBay CEO John Donahoe said today, “eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth.”

The company hopes to have sold Skype by the end of this year.

The news hasn’t really had any significant impact on the eBay stock price.

Telus will offer the 16GB (black/white) version for $199, the 32GB version will cost CND $299 and will be available in both black and white.

Both companies are not introducing exclusive monthly plans for the iPhone. Plans start at $50 per month at Telus, and at $55 per month at Bell.

At Telus, the most affordable plan will set you back $50 per month, and will give you 150 minutes with 500MB of data (with tethering included). All plans include unlimited messaging as well.

The most affordable plan at Bell will get you 300 minutes with 1GB of data (with tethering). The only real difference between Bell and Telus, is that Bell offers unlimited WiFi use at any Starbucks shop.

Rogers is also expected to introduce more value for its iPhone plans, but isn’t expected to lower prices.

With two new companies offering the iPhone now, one would think that competition would surely give Canadians more. However, the Canadian telecom market is still really an oligopoly (and Rogers still has a complete monopoly over the GSM networks in the country), so we shouldn’t really be expecting anything drastic in terms of price cuts as every player in an oligopoly naturally colludes on prices to maximize profits.

The company has vowed it would be the price leader this holiday season when it comes to selling toys.

Wal-Mart will be slashing prices on select toys such as Buzz Lightyear action figures by up to 30-percent, followed with more price cuts to up to 100 additional toys.

The company said it would offer a group of new and popular toys each week for only $10 each. Today marks the second week of specials. Wal-Mart will offer the deeply discounted products all the way up to Christmas Day, until supplies last, in both Canada and the United States in every store.

The deep discounts could prove damaging to toy sales in the future (especially for stores who can’t offer such low prices) as consumers could continue to expect the lowered prices.

Well, we knew Google would do this sooner or later. The company has announced it would begin to offer free GPS turn-by-turn navigation with its new and free Google Maps Navigation application.

The application will be initially available only in the United States and with support for devices running Android 2.0 or higher (see the second embedded video below to learn more about Android 2.0).

Google Maps Navigation supports voice search, satellite view, 3D view, traffic information, automatic rerouting, among many other features you would find on premium GPS devices.

The new Motorola Droid handset will be the first phone to support the new app. The app will later be released on most other popular mobile platforms including the iPhone and the BlackBerry.

The free navigation app from Google is essentially a perfect free substitute to the other standalone GPS units produced by Garmin and TomTom, among others. The news of the release of Google Maps Navigation sent the stocks of standalone GPS device makers plummeting up to 20-percent following the news. The Garmin stock dropped about $10 per share to $30, while the TomTom stock lost about half its value and is now trading at about $6.50 per share.

To really make this app perfect, the only thing Google now needs to do is let users download at least parts of a map so that people can use the GPS features on supported devices without requiring a cellphone signal. That would prove most useful to travelers who would use the feature on their phone without having to bear the excessive data costs imposed by telecoms while roaming.

The question now remains, what will companies like TomTom do to up their value proposition? What about the mobile iPhone app TomTom offers? We can surely expect TomTom to lower the price of the app substantially once Google Maps Navigation becomes available for the iPhone.

Google has also made a potentially very useful enhancement to Google Maps. You can now search for rental listings effortlessly in the app by simply turning on Real Estate layer via the ‘More’ button.

Microsoft recorded total sales as $12.9 billion (down 14-percent from the same period last year), but still topped analyst expectations.

Microsoft posted $3.6 billion ($0.40 per share) in profits, an 18-percent decrease compared to the same period in 2008.

Microsoft CFO Chris Linddell said today in a statement that the company is pleased with its performance. He also noted the company is keeping in line with cost estimates. Microsoft more recently began aggressively cutting costs, announcing 5,000 layoffs last January, the biggest in the company’s history.

The fourth quarter of 2009 is expected to be better as the company just launched Windows 7, which is expected to be very successful and also outsell Vista.

The launch of Windows 7 has prompted a series of new attack ads from rival Apple, the new TV advertisement placements are embedded below.

If you’d like to learn more about Windows 7, you should check out cnet’s comprehensive review of Windows 7 here complete with benchmarking tests.

The world’s biggest fast food chain, McDonald’s, has released stronger than expected Q3 earnings.

The company earned $1.26 billion ($1.15 per share), up compared to the same period last year with $1.19 billion in earnings ($1.05 per share).

The increase in revenue can be attributed to the company’s newest food offering, the more expensive and successful Angus Third Pounder burger.

The company noted currency losses for dragging revenue down, without considering currency losses, revenue for the quarter was actually up 2-percent.

Net income for the period was $1.26 billion ($1.15 per share), down from $1.19 billion ($1.05) from the same period last year.

Same store sales (stores opened at least a year) were up 2.5-percent.

The company beat out Wall Street expectations; analysts surveyed by Reuters were expecting earnings of $1.11 per share.

Mcdonald’s CEO Jim Skinner warned the fast-food business is slowing globally but anticipated a strong fourth quarter and positive same store sales growth in October, too.

The markets reacted favorably to the news, sending McDonald’s stock up by almost $2 per share (3.37% up) in earning morning trading.

A technical error in the Google algorithm is indexing private voicemail recordings from Google Voice and making them available to the public.

If you currently search “site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*” in Google, it will return various voicemails, some dated as far back as many months ago, to even only hours ago.

As of right now, if you perform the search string noted above, the voicemails are still available publically with transcription.

Google employee Vincent Paquet noted in a support forum question that Google has made a change in how the pages are indexed and crawled to prevent more private voicemails from being indexed. The website owner now has the option on if those pages will be indexed.

The last thing people would want here is for others to actually query a persons name included in the string to bring up very private voicemails of that specific person.

This latest incident reignites online privacy concerns over just how safe our data really is online and who is actually really using it.

But hey, I guess all this is okay since Google will be flipping the $13 per flight WiFi fee on Virigin America flights between November 10, 2009 through January 15, 2010.

The U.S. second-largest bank, the Bank of America, has posted poor Q3 (July to Sept) 2009 earnings, posting a massive $2.2 billion (a loss of $0.26 per share) loss in the quarter.

Revenue was up 33-percent in Q3 to $26.04 billion, but the increased losses stemming from an increasing number of people defaulting on their mortgage and credit loans resulted in those two units losing more than $1 billion in the period.

Bank of America’s credit business totaled losses of $1.04 billion, compared to only $167 million in the same period last year.

The results were worse than Wall Street expectations, with analysts expecting a loss of $0.21 per share.

The bank’s total allowances for ban loans/leases are now set at $35.83 billion.

BA’s wealth management division performed well, almost doubling profits compared to the same period last year.

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis warned analysts today that, “results in the fourth quarter are expected to continue to be challenging,” likely given adverse macroeconomic factors including increasing unemployment rates in the country.

The Bank of America is facing increased pressure, as government loan payments are due. Following massive payouts to executives, the Obama administration proposed that the bank’s CEO Kenneth Lewis should not be paid a salary (base of $1.5 million) or any bonus in 2009, Lewis later agreed from the mounting pressure and would return $1 million to the bank by the end of 2009.

It is expected RIM will be announcing availability in the coming days. The phone should head to Verizon first in the U.S. and later in the Europe from Vodafone.

The Storm 2 will feature basic enhancements compared to the first-generation Storm. RIM has enhanced the SureType text-entry to only electronic-based, and there will now be no moving parts. The memory has also been doubled to 256MB of flash memory, and there is now 2GB of on board storage. The device features GPS, a 3.2MP camera, and now includes 802.11 b/g WiFi.

The first generation of the BlackBerry Storm has sold over 1 million units worldwide.

According to reviews already posted of the Storm 2, the device seems more fine-tuned and sleek, but does not seem to offer anything really groundbreaking compared to existing BlackBerry handsets. The new OS 5.0 seems to be very responsive and the lag issues of the previous Storm seem to have been addressed which is surely to please users.