Fortune is speculating that Skype may be place up for sale by their owners Ebay.

Skype has been providing a proprietary peer-to-peer Voice over IP platform since 2003 and was bought by Ebay in September of 2005.

Fortune cites that ‘uneasy fit’ and the $3.1bn originally paid by Ebay as possible reasons for the sale.

Blonde 2.0 for Mashables.com brings us news that mobile p2p VoIP provider fring has released it’s API for third party developers.

This will enable others to develop new applications and add-ons for the fring platform.

The fring platform supports mobile devices such as the Symbian Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and the iPhone.

As a network, fring also integrates with Skype, AIM, Twitter, Google Talk and the industry standard SIP protocol.

Andy Abramson for VoIP Watch has written an article on the just released Skype 4.0 Beta.

Andy makes a point that the new Video-oriented interface for Skype 4.0 lends itself to rich-media contextual advertising being piped to the client while they make calls.

Perhaps, in future, you may find yourself watching an advert before you can place a video call.

You can download the Skype 4.0 Beta for windows but a note in Andy’s article references Jim Courtney for Skype Journal saying you should only install it on a spare machine.

According to VoIP News, Snom has introduced a new handset dubbed ‘klarVOICE‘ which can be adapted to work with any of their VoIP telephones.

Compared with standard phones, the handset allows the capture of more than twice the spectrum of voice frequencies, providing enhanced voice quality.

The handset is said to offer quality akin to ’speaking to somebody in the same room’

gigaom.com carries word that the big global Telcos such as AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, NTT etc could be working together to create a ‘Skype rival’ for 2009.

No real detail or grit is given on the product although I would hope that it would be a SIP or at least standards-based system unlike Skype which is uses a proprietary method.

The service is said to be designed to ultimately be available for mobile devices with 3G or 4G connections so presumably the model would be direct connection or client/server connection rather than Skype’s P2P routing model.

Some more detail over in Om Malik’s article.