Skype is apparently up for sale, with Cisco the likely buyer. True or false, Cisco makes a great deal of sense as a buyer, because it can monetize Skype’s user base in a way that Skype never could. With 560 million registered users (124 million of which are active), but only 8.1 million paying customers, Skype could use some help.

This may sound like heresy to acolytes of Silicon Valley economics. After all, the new economics of software go something like this: Give great stuff away, then charge for advanced features for the few who need them. In open source we call it “Open Core.” For Silicon Valley Web entrepreneurs, it’s “freemium.”

In both cases, it’s sub-optimal.

Read more at GigaOm.

It’s fascinating to watch enterprise adoption of Apple technology given its apparent disdain for this market. According to The Wall Street Journal, businesses are tripping over themselves to justify iPad purchases, just a few years after they resisted the rise of the Mac and rejected the iPhones in their midst.

All without a penny spent by Apple on marketing to the enterprise.

Well, that’s not quite true….

Read the rest at GigaOm.

Nimbula, a provider of cloud infrastructure software and founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, on Monday announced that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. That brings total funding to more than $20 million. Current investor Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula’s first round of venture financing, also participated in this round.

Nimbula emerged from stealth mode in June and in fact has remained somewhat stealthy. The basic premise of the software is to provide private-cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon Web Services EC2 platform–an approach quite similar to the open-source Eucalyptus project.

Read the rest at CNET.