Skype Office, Stockholm, Sweden

Building on the revitalization which had begun in 2008, eBay announced, in April 2009, plans to spin off Skype through an initial public offering in 2010. In August, Joltid filed a motion with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to terminate a licensing agreement with eBay which allows eBay (and therefore Skype) to use the peer-to-peer communications technology on which Skype is based. If successful, this may have caused a shutdown of Skype in its current form, and made an IPO challenging to execute. In September, eBay announced the sale of 65 per cent of Skype to a consortium of Index Ventures and Silver Lake Partners. Early in September, Skype shut down the Extras developer program. In November Skype settled the Joltid litigation and acquired all Skype technology in exchange for equity in the company and eBay completed the sale of 70% of Skype to a consortium comprising Silver Lake Partners, Joltid, CPPIB, and Andreessen Horowitz for approximately $2 billion, valuing the entire business at US$2.75 billion.
In January 2010, Josh Silverman was recognized for his accomplishments in revitalizing Skype by being named First Runner Up in the TechCrunch "Crunchies" award for "Best CEO", beaten only by Mark Pincus of Zynga.
In May, Skype 5.0 beta was released, with support of group video calls with up to four participants. Also in May, Skype released an updated client for the Apple iPhone which allowed Skype calls to be made over a 3G network. Originally, a 3G call subscription plan was to be instituted in 2011, but Skype eventually dropped the plan.
In June 2010, following the rapid departure of first Daniel Berg and then Madhu Yarlagadda as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer, Mark Gillett an operating executive at Silver Lake Partners assumed the role of Chief Development Officer following a period of several months working closely with Joshua Silverman to drive the transformation of the business and acceleration of cross platform and mobile product delivery.