If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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BoomTown recently had lunch in Silicon Valley with Ted Leonsis, one of the most colorful, interesting and early of the modern Web’s entrepreneurs.
Leonsis is best known as the man who put the oomph into AOL during its glory days in the last century, when he joined CEO Steve Case in 1993 to grow the company [...]

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If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is serious about finding a true No. 2 to replace outgoing exec Owen Van Natta and more, then BoomTown has certainly at least two cents to add.
So here is our list of ideas, which include a number of women execs, since a list that Facebook has made apparently includes a [...]

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Fortune had an interesting article by Jeffrey M. O’Brien on the links between and among the various alumni of the PayPal online payment service, focusing on the Mafia-like aspects of their affiliation.
Actually, after reading it, with all the silly sniping among some of them (now all apparently resolved), it sounded to me more like the [...]

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