Interesting NYT report…

The interesting thing is that the core auction business has gone flat, whereas other businesses they bought — like PayPal, Shopping.com and Skype — seem to be doing quite nicely.

In the first quarter, the number of auction listings increased by only 2 percent, to 588 million. But the total dollar value of merchandise sold in the auctions increased by 14 percent, to $14.28 billion.

In the PayPal unit, revenue was $439 million, up 31 percent. The total volume of payments processed — on which eBay earns a percentage fee — was $11.36 billion, up 30 percent. The fastest-growing part of this business was PayPal Merchant Services, which processes payments on sites other than eBay. That unit handled $4.38 billion in payments, up 51 percent.

PayPal Merchant Services competes directly with the new Google Checkout service, as well as offerings from several banks. Ms. Whitman said eBay had yet to see significant pressure from the Google offering.

Youssef Squali, an analyst for Jefferies & Company, said, “PayPal continues to be the rock star of that business.”

Skype, which earns money largely from fees to connect users to the telephone system, posted revenue of $79 million, up 123 percent. EBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. “This is a very young business growing very fast,” Ms. Whitman said.

EBay has also increasingly been benefiting from a deal with Yahoo to sell advertising on its site. In the quarter, it had $60.5 million in advertising revenue, up 65 percent.

Well, I suppose the only positive thing is that he didn’t post his video on YouTube…

The student who shot dead at least 30 people at Virginia Tech sent a package to the US TV network NBC News on the day of the shootings, police said…

Clearing out my office, I came on an old Apple external hard drive from the 1980s. Capacity: 20 Megabytes — which is 0.02 Gigabytes. Next to it is a 60 GB iPod. Next to that is a 2GB flash drive. Sobering, isn’t it? The strange thing is that the Apple drive seemed enormous at the time. I remember thinking that if I wrote continuously for 10 years I still wouldn’t have generated enough text to fill it.

But then Bill Gates once said that 640 Kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone. Or maybe that’s just an urban legend. He’s too smart to have said something that dumb. In the old days, people used to say that you could never be too thin or too rich. Nowadays we say that you can never have too much RAM. Or disk space.

What is true is that Natham Myhrvold (who was for a time Gates’s technical guru) observed that “software is like a gas — it expands to fill the space available”.

To get to the studio, of course.*

The kids and I were in London and we went to Abbey Road (which is a lovely residential area btw). Naturally, we had to photograph the famous crossing which is on the cover of the Abbey Road album. The EMI recording studio where the Beatles recorded it in 1969 is the building behind the low white wall with the van parked in the drive.

It’s clearly a place of pilgrimage. The wall in front of the studio has lots of inscriptions. Like this:

And this:

On thing I hadn’t known is that Edward Elgar had an association with the Studio. There’s a plaque to prove it.

*Hmmm… Just checked the album cover on Wikipedia, and the Beatles are actually walking away from the Studio. Collapse of stout hypothesis.

From the Yahoo blog. Co-founder David Filo writes…

Jerry Yang and I just announced at our quarterly employee all-hands that Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

We’ve been focused on this area for a while now. Our commute alternatives program has been recognized annually by the EPA since 2001 for incentives like Wi-Fi enabled biodiesel shuttles, bike lockers, carpool matching, and sizeable public transit subsidies. Our recycling program keeps about 180,000 pounds of materials out of landfills each year. We use renewable power, hydroelectric energy, and passive cooling at our various facilities and data centers. And green-minded Yahoos have launched sustainability-focused products like the Yahoo! Autos Green Center and 18Seconds.org to show people how they can make a difference in their own lives.

We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce their impact. We’ll continue to be vigilant about cutting ours, looking for creative ways to power our facilities, encourage even more employees to seek alternative commutes, and generally inspire Yahoos around the world to think differently about their energy use. (For example, in honor of Earth Day, we’re challenging Yahoos to decrease their consumption by 20% this week to help build lasting habits.) We’ll also be deliberate about investing in offset projects that can verifiably deliver their expected environmental benefits…