June 25, 2007 | Monday

Google’s latest acquisition made to wind up eBay?

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |PPC |Search Engines |Google

Okay, I don’t think Google would actually buy a company just to wind up eBay...but I suspect that they would consider it a nice bonus to an already satisfactory deal. Stick with me here…

TechCrunch (which broke the story of Google’s purchase of YouTube, amongst many other big scoops) is reporting that the search giant has acquired GrandCentral, a telephone management start-up. TechCrunch says that The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”

So what’s that got to do with eBay?

[T]he synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms.

Skype, lest we forget, became an eBay company in 2005. So is this acquisition - which TechCrunch is highly confident has already closed - timed to get up the noses of eBay after they forced Google to make an embarrassing climbdown in a feud over PayPal (another eBay company)? That is anyone’s guess, but eBay has certainly made life difficult for Google with its recent boycott of AdWords. Speaking of which, this is what eBay had to say about how that panned out:

The test we began last week was successful. We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought. By re-allocating our marketing dollars to our other partners, such as Yahoo!, AOL and MSN, we were able to increase traffic and find efficiencies that will enable us to drive more value to our sellers and partners going forward.

As John Battelle put it, Wow, that’s not exactly makeup sex, is it?!