eBay

Groupon responds to LivingSocial swipe

FORTUNE -- At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, LivingSocial CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy had some choice words for Groupon in which he accused the daily deals competitor of copying several of his company's recent efforts, including LivingSocial Instant, a service offering near-real-time deals that may only last one or two hours.

We ran an edited version of his comments earlier this week.

"So we launched LivingSocial Instant, and Groupon launched their clone of that MORE

Skype: The inside story of the boffo $8.5 billion deal

How executive shuffles, product changes, and a delayed IPO paid off for a couple of private equity firms.

By Kevin Maney, contributor

FORTUNE -- In September 2009, Silver Lake Partners and venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz bought Skype from eBay, where it had become the Kurt Cobain of technology companies (wildly popular, deeply troubled). The value of that deal: $2.75 billion.

In May 2011 the new owners announced that they were selling the company to MORE

Why mobile payments can't come soon enough

Services from Google, Square and Intuit are already simplifying consumer credit. But it's the long-term changes that will redefine how merchants, banks and consumers interact.

This is the second in a series of articles leading up to the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, which will be held from July 19-21 in Aspen, Colorado. Fortune Brainstorm Tech will round up many of the best and brightest thinkers in technology. Our coverage in this MORE

Venmo: Fighting the good fight against the online payment giants

In each corner of the startup world there's a Venmo for every Paypal -- a little engine that could, and wants to, badly.

FORTUNE -- Hours before I met Andrew Kortina, I had already given him my credit card number. I don't do this with just any stranger. But Kortina and his cofounder Iqram Magdon-Ismail have built a service called Venmo, which promises to make mobile payments so easy, people will MORE

Airbnb: Changing where backpackers and billionaires sleep-away

The startup with "startling" growth is part of a second generation of disruptors -- improving on businesses like Craigslist, that were disruptors themselves.

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE -- The sad truth about hotel rooms is they are at bottom hostile to the spirit of adventure. They lock tourists away from the city's vibrant social life, isolating their guests in charmless, anonymous spaces with no kitchens but plenty of cable TV and MORE

Thousands in London queue for iPad 2

"I only need to say this one sentence to get across the magnitude of this launch," wrote Julian Alexander (AKA Tommo_UK) on Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board Friday evening:

"The lines were bigger than for ANY launch, I have ever seen, for anything, anywhere. Including for any iPhone launched to-date or last year's iPad.

"Simply awe inspiring," he continued. "There must have been several thousand people lining up outside the MORE

Why startups don't go public anymore

Facebook, Twitter, Groupon -- hot Internet startups are using private financing to grow like never before. Why do they trust the social graph to be the backbone of their business model but not of their statement of ownership?

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

The web is nothing if not a democratizing force. It has turned us into active investors with low-cost commissions from online accounts and free access to vast amounts of financial MORE

The $200 name-brand Android tablet

For the WSJ's Brett Arends, the Android-powered Nook Color with its sub-$200 price tag is the perfect tablet.

Who says you can't get a quality tablet for under $500?

It is certainly no iPad 2 or XOOM, but for a certain segment of the population, the Nook Color might be all the tablet they need.  Apple's (AAPL) iPad clocks in at $499 (old models can be had for $100 less) and the MORE

Can Groupon crack the China puzzle?

The leading daily deals site has everything going for it domestically, but that means nothing when it comes to avoiding the scrap heap other high-flying U.S. Internet companies have been tossed onto in China.

When Groupon China finally, officially, goes live, again, it will have some 1,700 local "tuangou" sites to compete with. Yes, if anything sums up the hurdles Groupon is facing in China, it's that the language of the MORE

Why Alibaba's CEO had to go

Alibaba says the fraud perpetrated on its users is minor and immaterial, fiscally, to its investors. But top leaders still fell on their swords to save the company's reputation where it really counts.

By Bill Powell, contributor

For several years now, the Internet firm Alibaba-Taobao has been one of the
 most prominent Chinese companies on the planet—thanks both to its
 success and to its brash, charismatic founder and chairman, "Jack O' (Yun)
Ma, MORE