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EBay is working on software to replace the guts of Skype but is worried that it may not succeed, may lose a court battle with Skype's founders over rights to the core technology and may need to do something drastic in the next few years. The company said in a regulatory filing yesterday that if it fails in both the legal and technical avenues it's pursuing then "continued operation of Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible."

Skype released a new version of its client for Mac this morning and the changes are not as small as the company implies in its announcement. The new version enables full or partial screen sharing through video chat, allows you to receive a chat notification when a contact changes their mood status, lets you purchase wifi connectivity at public hotspots with your Skype account, allows you to write notes on your contacts' profiles and more. It's a pretty impressive upgrade.

Release notes are here, download is here. To be honest, we had some trouble in testing a few of the new features, though they'd been present in the beta version. If you haven't been using the beta, you'll want to upgrade now.

This is how it's supposed to work. A team of super-smart engineers/entrepreneurs comes up with a radical plan to disrupt a huge industry. It builds its technology, gets traction, and, in a few years, sells the venture for over a billion dollars. What do these super-smart engineers do with their new-found wealth? They create a VC fund to invest in early-stage deals with which other entrepreneurs/engineers can disrupt very large industries. Their fund has been investing since 2003 and has a portfolio of around 30 companies.

Meet Ambient Sound Investments (ASI).

We hate to burst your bubble, but the ReadWriteWeb newsroom is not the luxuriant, mahogany den of intellectualism that you envision. Instead, we discuss the greater points of start ups, enterprise and the tech world via conference chat in the comfort of our pajamas. When you've got a virtual team, tools like chat, email and voice over IP are your lifeline. Sipgate founder Thilo Salmon hopes his recent launch of sipgate one VoIP will add new work features where Skype, Fring and Jajah mobile have left off.

Skype, the popular VOIP client formerly owned by eBay, just released a new beta version of its Windows client. The new version finally brings screen sharing to the Windows client, something which already became available in the last beta version of the Mac client in January. In addition, Skype now also allows users to import their contacts from Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail, AOL, LinkedIn, and Yahoo.

Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.

The latest update to the Skype iPhone application delivered some minor improvements and fixes, but the biggest update involves a new warning message directed at the owners of jailbroken iPhones. After launching the updated version of Skype (v 1.0.2), you'll see a message that reads "this version of Skype is only supported on unmodified iPhone OS." Why is Skype doing this?

Online auction giant eBay, rumored to be shopping around for a buyer for its 2005 acquisition of voice-over-IP phone service Skype, announced in a press release today that it has now decided to prep the ground for a 2010 Skype IPO launch. The announcement also says that this is one of several outcomes considered for Skype when eBay president John Donahoe became CEO early in 2008.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, are trying to pile up enough cash from investors and their own bank accounts to buy the company back from eBay, according to an admirable scoop of a report by Brad Stone at the New York Times today.

Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay for roughly $3 billion in 2005 but no one was quite sure why. The remaining Skype team has done a fair job continuing to innovate inside the much slower moving eBay, but we've got our fingers crossed: a buy-back by the founders would likely put innovation in the driver's seat again at Skype.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter where the top stories of the week are summarized, we present highlights from our coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo (held this week in San Francisco), review the new Skype app for iPhone, discuss the local / mobile Web with a panel of experts in our podcast show RWW Live, check out the winners of the Ribbit VOIP KillerApps Challenge, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

I had about 3 story options on my plate to write about tonight. But I found myself constantly returning to the iTunes store and searching for Skype, over and over again. Finally, there it was: As promised by no less a personage than Om Malik himself, the official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks. Plus there are a few additional touches specific to this client that make it really great.