Rich Tehrani was in my office last week saying he thought Skype was going to file an IPO very soon. He thought it was very odd that Skype declined invitations to keynote / speak at TMC's ITEXPO - the show that all major VoIP players attend. Skype has never declined an invitation in the past.

We both theorized that Skype was probably entering their "quiet period" to launch an IPO. He tasked me with looking into it, but alas, I was too busy working on TMC Labs Innovation Awards. Well, today Skype filed their S-1 to go public. Guess I should have blogged it earlier. Oh well.

Skype currently has 560 million registered with only about 8.1 million of them are monthly paying users. Paying customers average $96 a year for the service. I'm not sure in this so-called "economic recovery" that it's the time to file for an IPO. But then again, we could be in this "economic recovery" for quite some time, so Skype can't procrastinate forever.

It'll be interesting to see if Skype can top the $2.75 billion eBay sold Skype for or the $3 billion eBay paid for Skype in their IPO. I'm thinking Wall Street investors are in no mood for tech IPOs right now. So I'm guessing it'll go for $2 billion tops. But I could be wrong.

Update:
I overestimated at $2 billion. Looks like their looking to raise $100 million with their IPO. That seems a bit on the low side.