Microsoft made headlines this week by buying internet business Skype for $8.5 billion. While some may argue that this is just another thing for them to add to their portfolio that will not grow, I would argue that this is a smart move by Microsoft.

They made a smart move in allowing the company to grow to a large size before acquiring it; there is already a large customer base, almost everyone knows about it even if they do not use it, and it has a good reputation among the technology community.

It was also a good situation for the group of investors, including Ebay, who had partial ownership of shares in the company. While these investors have deep pockets, none have the software expertise of Microsoft that has the potential to grow this newest addition to the family into the giant it could be.

Read the whole story here.

Ever wish you could pick your own price for your clothes? Shadoodle lets you do just that.

The process is simple and fun. After you log in, you are asked a series of questions about the shirt you want to design and purchase. You can choose the style of the shirt and what designs, names, or numbers are to be put on the front and back. Next, you are asked to say how many shirts you will be purchasing.

Once all of this information has been entered, you can enter in the amount you want to pay per shirt. The site will immediately respond with a witty answer to inform you if the price is reasonable or too low. Once you have negotiated a price, you move on the order your shirts with the exact specifications you want.

Shadoodle makes designing and ordering T-shirts for all occasions easy, fun, and more affordable. Bargain for your shirt at Shadoodle.com.

Hulu is a great model for internet entrepreneurship.  Target customers desire the ability to watch television shows for free at a convenient time.  Hulu grants this ability with their services.  The website fills a niche that is left open by other online video websites.  It is preferable to NetFlix for many users because there is no subscription required.  It is also preferable to YouTube because it offers a lot of premium content for viewing, whereas YouTube is centered around user-made videos.  Hulu generates revenue through commercial advertisements where normal commercials would exist in the shows.  Users are willing to watch these advertisements because the service, bar the ads, is free and convenient.

Pandora Radio provides a brand new way to discover new music with the Music Genome Project.  Music professionals classify songs according to 400 musical attributes in an effort to link similar songs in a way never before done.  They succeed, and the Pandora project works very well.   From a monetary perspective, Pandora survives through advertisements.  Initially, the station only had visual advertisements, but in 2009 the station implemented audio ads sporadically during the listening experience.  While it may not be the “cool” thing to do, the radio cannot survive without the ads because of the licensing fees.

Pandora is an excellent example of an online business entity that does not use a conventional blog-form and advertising website setup.  The creators saw a need for an innovative way to discover new music and capitalized on it: the result was Pandora.

If you look into the past, you will notice that a lot of the things which used to be very complex and complicated have become simpler and easier to use. The complexity has become more hidden to the regular user of a product or service.

For example you don’t know about all the complexities that put together a phone but you can use it easily anyway. The future of the internet entrepreneur will be like that too. Internet Entrepreneurs will be able to set-up complex web sites and advertising systems in minutes, with ease, by themselves.

Right now, most people who want to start an online business struggle with stuff like web design, SEO, newsletters, and pay per click advertising. They struggle so much that they either give up as soon as they find out how hard they are to do, or they never really manage to get a full time income from their online business.

These can be huge obstacles in the way of success for many people, which is why some companies are doing their best today to automate these obstacles as much as possible.

You can use kit’s such as carbon copy to help get started. You can overcome these obstacles.