As GigaOm first reported, eBay’s enormously cheap voice over IP service, Skype, is coming to the iPhone. Both the Wall Street Journal and CNET got the inside scoop. Anyone who travels internationally knows how painfully expensive and annoying it is to stay connected to home, so there’s been a lot of enthusiasm about two popular mobile players joining forces. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as great as it sounds. The calls have to be routed over wireless networks, not AT&T’s 3G network. Translation: Dropped calls galore. Since most people consider it rude to chat away in, say, a Starbucks the most reliable place to make a call would likely be a home or office, where you’ve already got a laptop and could make a Skype call the old-fashioned way. You can text Skype chats over the AT&T network, but there are already a host of IM clients running on the iPhone. It's an unfortunate yawn for the average user if you ask me.

Meanwhile, PaidContent reports that Google and Disney are close to a content deal that would allow certain premium clips to run on YouTube and preclude them from running on Hulu. The big question is what this means for Hulu, the site the major networks designed to avoid cutting deals with YouTube. New media blog NewTeeVee says that other networks are also pulling content from Hulu, warning the much-loved site that “big media is (is) getting ready to eat its young"...

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Let’s call this issue of Valley Buzz the comparatively good news edition. First up, news for Google employees: As of this morning at 6 a.m. the offering period to exchange any options that were priced higher than $308.57, the stock’s closing price on Friday, expired. The re-pricing program started on February 3, and the company says it will help Google retain top employees. You know, those ones who haven’t already gone to Facebook or retired on an island. But not all investors are so happy about the move. Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research, published a note on Friday warning investors that Google was “manipulating” the stock price to give employees a better deal.

For more a more sanguine view on Google, check out chief executive Eric Schmidt on The Charlie Rose Show, which might as well relocate to Silicon Valley to better accommodate its recent stream of guests like Marc Andreessen, Marisa Mayer, Evan Williams of Twitter and other valley luminaries. On the show, Schmidt talked up the role of mobile in Google’s future. He might want to read last Friday’s Valley Buzz...

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It may be a recession, but not everyone has lost his or her job. Gadget spending may be down, but it’s not completely out, as my guest BusinessWeek columnist Steve Wildstrom explains.

In fact, one area of gadgetry is actually growing in spending: Smart phones. It’s hard to resist the panoply of offerings in 2009 whether you’re tempted by the early versions of the Google-phone, the many iterations of Blackberry, the sexy new Palm Pre or the still-sexy iPhone. It’s also hard to resist a purchase that’s mostly subsidized by the carriers.

Big flat-panel TVs are another matter. They aren’t moving no matter what the discount. One problem is most people who want one, already have one, and there’s no reason to upgrade in this economy. And if you are still in the market? Wildstrom says to wait because prices are only falling lower. Off-camera, I confessed to my 300-pound, 36-inch CRT set at home. “They still get the best picture,” he said. I guess recession or no, upgrades aren’t always a good thing.

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Like most well-heeled technology reviewers, BusinessWeek’s Steve Wildstrom knows one thing about Apple: That he has no clue what product they’ll be launching next. But, of course, such epic secrecy only drives the rumor mill more.

In this segment, Wildstrom and I discuss the various rumors that are making their ways around the blogosphere as we creep closer to Apple’s June World Wide Developer Conference. Is there a new iPhone coming out? Most likely, but it won’t be a dramatically new iPhone. Watch the video to find out why.

Also, Wildstrom discusses why the new Mac Mini could be an exciting product for Apple, and what he’d like to see the company announce. Leave your own Apple wish list in the comments.

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There’s a new Silicon Valley-Hollywood rivalry: Mark Zuckerberg vs. Perez Hilton. The irascible LA gossip monger—wielding his digital sharpie--called for a boycott of the popular social networking site yesterday. It all started on a not-so-sleepy holiday weekend in the Valley when Facebook decided to switch its terms of service. Under the old language, when someone deleted their Facebook account, all the media he or she uploaded—notes, photos, videos and the like—would no longer be part of Facebook’s content troves. Now, Facebook retains the right to all that data and content in perpetuity. Perez wasn’t alone in his outrage. The move sent many tech bloggers screaming foul, too.

Facebook founder Zuckerberg penned another in his series of calm-down-everyone blog posts saying that Facebook had no plans to start selling college photos as clip art, rather it was treating Facebook communications as permanent one-way exchanges, just like email...

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Sure, Research in Motion’s Blackberry Storm has sold 500,000 units in its first month on the market. But that’s well below the 2.4 million Apple sold of the 3G iPhone in the first quarter it was on the market. And those people who bought the Storm? A good number of them are complaining about a buggy, flawed user experience.

My guest Om Malik is one of the Valley’s experts on telecom and mobile and has hated the Storm since early on. RIM’s problem? Not playing to their strengths in a desperate bid to push back on the iPhone’s success. As for Jim Balsillie, RIM co-CEO, and his contention that the Storm has been “an overwhelming success,” Malik quips that saying he looks like Brad Pitt doesn’t make it the truth. Earlier we discussed:

• Reports that Skype may be for sale, and
• Twitter's valuation.

There is a huge black rain cloud hanging over Silicon Valley today. I mean that literally and figuratively. (Stellar Google results, aside.) We should just rename earnings season “layoffs season,” because who isn’t doing them? Small startups like Digg continue to announce reductions, but truth be told these are small in number, and not all that surprising as companies fall under new pressure to profit in a tougher advertising environment. More damaging to the tech economy are the layoffs from public companies.

Not only did Microsoft add to the list today with its 5,000-person cuts, but Sun Microsystems is laying off 6,000 people in its continual slide into irrelevancy. Blogger Matt Asay notes that RedHat’s market cap has finally passed Sun’s -- a symbolic move for open source zealots. Sun may have embraced open source, but is the reverse true?

Meanwhile, the Journal reports that at IBM, plans to lay off up to 16,000 employees are underway. I argued in my BusinessWeek column this week that companies should be careful with layoffs in an age when employee loyalty is rapidly eroding and Web services like eHealth.com make being a contractor far more appealing. After all, the downturn won’t last forever. As long as the Wall Street drum for pink slips keeps banging, expect more days like today...

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From All Things Digital:

Apple’s iPhone hasn’t supplanted Research In Motion’s BlackBerry as the gold standard of mobile business tools, but give it another year or so and it just might. According to new research from ChangeWave, the iPhone has steadily increased its market share, growing from just 11 percent in June to 23 percent. Meanwhile, the BlackBerry lost a point of market share, falling to 41 percent in the same period.

More data after the jump.

So far, this week's tech news is a mix of the bad, the good and the highly speculative.

In the first and second categories, Research in Motion reported long after the close last night that it blew its third quarter:

• Quarterly sales will drop between $2.75-$2.78 billion, below the $2.96 billion consensus and about 9% below its $2.95-$3.10 billion forecast.
• RIM added 2.6 million new subscribers in Q3, 10% below its 2.9 million forecast.

On a happier note, RIM also announced that on the day its new BlackBerry Storm launched "daily net subscriber account additions reached a record level." Fine, but if RIM wants to go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone (and avoid Palm's fate) they need to deliver products: The Storm is still back-ordered at Verizon Wireless, and the BlackBerry faithful aren't happy about it.

On the rumor-mill front, Yahoo has apparently attracted a new suitor. The WSJ says Jon Miller, former head of AOL, is hoping to make a bid for our parent company in "a deal that would be worth about $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo shareholders ... which would involve raising about $28 billion to $30 billion to purchase the entire company." That may have been chump change to Miller, a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a few years ago, but raising $30 billion in today's economy is no small feat.

More to the point, there's a real debate over whether Miller really is seriously trying to raise money to make a bid for Yahoo, which seems to be the subject of a lot of rumor-mongering these days.

From AllThingsD:

Somewhere between the laptop and the smart phone, the computer industry has long believed there could be a small, low-cost device that would please consumers and sell well.

The device would be more versatile than, say, an iPhone, but much cheaper and more portable than, say, a ThinkPad. The trouble is, every attempt to create such a category of computer has met with failure — until now.

This year, that in-between type of computer now called a “netbook” has finally caught on. Since I reviewed a pioneering model, the 7-inch, $300 Asus Eee PC back in January, the market has been flooded with new and better, if somewhat more expensive, netbook models. Nearly every company — from big names such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to obscure ones like MSI — has jumped into the fray.

Netbooks still constitute a smaller niche than laptops and the exploding smart phone, or hand-held computer, category. But they are threatening to break into the mainstream in a big way, especially in an economic climate where a low price and fewer bells and whistles are suddenly more attractive.