The future of Skype, arguably the most popular Internet telephony program around, could be in jeopardy, due to an ongoing legal battle.

In a quarterly filing, parent company eBay noted it would be forced to discontinue the service if it loses the right to use part of its peer-to-peer VOIP (voice over IP) software and can’t find a replacement. As CNN, which first reported the filing, points out, though, there’s no immediate danger of Skype going away.

The fight is with a company called Joltid, which claims Skype broke a licensing agreement to use the software. EBay, predictably, said it believes it can win the court fight, but it is developing its own replacement peer-to-peer VOIP as a precaution. There is, of course, no guarantee that development will be successful.

Beyond the potential shutdown of the company, the legal fight creates an additional pair of headaches for Skype. EBay has been eager to spin the company off publicly, with a target of the first part of next year. Looming legal problems could delay that.

In the meantime, Google is in the midst of a closed beta test of Google Voice, which will send calls to users' mobile, home and work phone numbers to a singly number, offer cheap international rates and offer other features, which could be a threat to Skype regardless of its legal situation.

At present, Skype boasts over 480 million registered users, who use the service mostly for video and telephone conversations.

The Weekly World News, that supermarket tabloid that doesn’t even pretend to care about the truth, has come to the iPhone. The company behind Bat Boy, regular Bigfoot updates and UFO news you won’t find elsewhere has put together an app for the device showcasing some of its greatest covers.

Sadly, the offerings are pretty sparse for your 99 cents. You can peruse 24 classic covers, but the real fun is the ability to swap faces from your photos with the ones on the covers. (My wife was more than a little unhappy to see her face on a page with the headline “Captured Alien is 500 Years Old!” Personally, I giggled like I was being treated with nitrous oxide.)

The covers (altered or otherwise) can be shared with friends, which may land me in further trouble.

Granted, it’s a silly waste of time and money, but it’s no worse than 50 percent of the other apps on the market today.

Looks like Microsoft is taking its fight with Apple to the next level.

The company today began accepting app submissions from developers for its Windows Mobile Marketplace. Certification, it says, will take roughly 10 business days initially – and should an app be rejected, developers will get a detailed report explaining exactly why it was passed over.

Apple, of course, is the leader in user-generated apps, with over 71,000 different offerings.  Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do, but it does have a huge user base already installed in phones like the Samsung Blackjack and others.

“Our strategy for all of this is pretty straightforward; we want to create a global marketplace for Windows Phones where developers and users meet to sell and buy high quality and high value applications that make work easier and life more fulfilling,” said Microsoft on a company blog. “We’re creating a clear process and new opportunity for developers and ISVs to make money from their investment in innovation.”

Juniper Research predicts mobile application downloads will hit 20 billion by 2014, so Microsoft’s growing interest in the market is hardly a mystery. The interesting thing to watch will be how Windows Mobile apps will differ from those on the iPhone. Apart from the expected slew of games and productivity apps (like tip calculators or GPS offerings), will they veer more to the professional arena or the flatulence simulators that run amok at Apple?

More importantly, will Hollywood techies come up with apps that directly serve the film community?

Productivity on planes used to be limited to working on a PowerPoint presentation or document. Slowly, though, today’s frequent flyers are able to go online while in the air – and Aircell, the top provider of in-flight internet, has just made it a little easier.

The company has expanded the pricing options for its GoGo services, which are available on select flights on Delta, United and American - and all Virgin America and AirTran flights. (Air Canada service will launch soon as well.)

Passengers lucky enough to be on one of the planes carrying the service now have the option to purchase passes for either short haul flights or a 24-hour pass (in case you’re doing a same-day return or will be making multiple connections).

The short haul pass will cost $5.95 and will cover flights lasting up to 1.5 hours. The 24-hour pass will run $12.95, but is currently only available on AirTran and Delta planes.

While distribution of in-flight internet is still limited, that’s changing. Delta plans to offer the service on over 300 planes by the end of the year, a move that may force competitors to increase their usage as well. 

Just as the firestorm of controversy about ad-supported bloggers begins to die down, Twitter is about to see a surge. Paid tweets are on the way – and they’ll have some celebrities behind them.

Holly Madison (from “The Girls Next Door”) will be one of at least 10 celebs to help roll out “SponsoredTweets.com”, a new service that will let advertisers reach out to popular Twitter users and hire them to promote products in 140 characters or less.

“The goal is to make this a platform that has a diverse base of celebrities participating - everything from TV stars to sports celebrities to sports teams and media properties,” says Ted Murphy, founder of the site.

Scheduled to go live on July 27, SponsoredTweets won’t be exclusive to stars. Any Twitter user can sign up and set their price to tweet a product. Advertisers will then contact users that interest them and make an offer.

“The average Twitter user has less than 150 followers,” says Murphy. “Celebrities have hundreds of thousands. Those turn into some pretty big assets for the celebrities and we want to provide them with a tool to monitize those.”

There’s a slippery slope by mixing ads with tweets, though. Fans often see celebrity Twitter accounts as a way to communicate directly with actors, musicians and sports stars. To see those personal missives mixed with ads could damage that relationship.

There’s also the shadow of the paid blogging controversy. Many bloggers who acted as journalists have acknowledged accepting cash to positively promote a product. In this case, how will fans be able to differentiate between a casual mention of a product in a tweet and a paid endorsement?

Murphy says the ads will be clearly labeled.

“Everything in the platform - every tweet - has to be disclosed,” he says. “What we’ve done is built in a software system that enforces disclosure. We’re trying to bring a level of transparency to the process.”

Perhaps so, but one of Twitter’s appeals for many people has been its reputation as an Oasis from the ad clutter of the rest of the Internet. Upsetting that balance could be a risky game.

The rumors started in April: Dell might be looking to expand beyond its computer roots into the smart phone space. The company said nothing.

Then came the leaked pictures. Blurry, but they had a taste of reality to them. The company said nothing.

Now the company’s talking – but it’s stopping just short of saying “we’re doing one”. What’s the holdup?

"What operators want from us is a [smart phone] solution that's about supporting their technology...and their value-added services," Ron Garriques, president of Dell's consumer division, told analysts at a gathering last week.

 Here’s what’s suspected about Dell’s smart phone plans:

• It will be touch-screen centric, like the iPhone.
• It will use Google’s Android operating system
• It probably won’t be limited to a single cell phone provider. (Garriques hinted the company has been talking with the top three or four carriers to assess their needs and desires)
• It may not launch in the U.S. (At least one analyst believes Dell may use China as a test market.)

Other speculation, including launch dates, is completely unreliable at this point.

Garriques came to Dell from Motorola and his non-compete agreement reportedly expired earlier this year, which has added fuel to the smart phone fire. Add it all up and it’s pretty obvious Dell is gearing up to make a move. So why won’t it just come out and say so?

Well, it’s possible the company may reverse course. It wouldn’t be the first company to build out a prototype of a new sort of hardware only to change its mind. (Nintendo has done so several times, including a scuttled handheld gaming system that was developed after the launch of the DS.)

That seems unlikely, though. It’s more likely that Dell wants to manage the release of the announcement. But as interest in its smart phone plans continues to grow, that’s going to mean more and more leaks – reducing the impact of the announcement when Dell makes it official.

Despite my less than glowing review of the DX, I want to state up front that I really am a fan of Amazon’s e-book reader. The idea is great and the execution is generally pretty good, even if the price is still entirely too high.

But lately when it comes to Kindle service, the e-tailer has seemed like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Customers who had the Kindle 2 found that the case they paid an extra $30 for was cracking their device – and Amazon was charging $200 to repair them. (It has since dropped that policy.)

Now, the company has remotely deleted every legitimately purchased copy of “1984” and “Animal Farm”. The New York Times reports the publisher of those books changed its mind about offering an electronic edition of the classics and Amazon capitulated to those whims.

It’s akin to a Waldenbooks store manager breaking into your house and taking back the copy of the last “Harry Potter” book because a publisher said so. Never mind that the e-books were paid for.

David Pogue rightly points out that Kindle sales are apparently not final, which gives fence sitters yet another reason to stick with the bound products.

Sure Amazon may reverse itself in a few days and return the books to owners or offer some sort of additional compensation beyond the refund it supplied people who bought the book (though there’s no guarantee it will do either).

The message, though, is clear: You, as the customer, are secondary to its partners. Thanks, Amazon. Thanks a lot. 

UPDATE: Word is trickling down that Amazon made the move because the publisher that uploaded the books using a self-service platform did not have the publishing rights to them. That said, it vowed it would not repeat this should the situation present itself in the future. So the reason behind the action makes a bit more sense now -- but the action itself is no more correct than it was before the explanation. 

Samsung’s web-enabled TVs and Blu-Ray players just got a nice value-add.

Blockbuster OnDemand, the company’s streaming movie service, has signed a distribution deal with the electronics manufacturer, bringing free streaming films to basically all of the company’s Web-enabled 2009 models. The pipeline of content will open this fall.

It’s something of a one-two punch for Samsung, which already has an agreement with Netflix to stream movies through some of its Web-enabled Blu-Ray players. Blockbuster’s deal promises them “preferred positioning” on the players, though it’s unclear what that means, exactly.

Blockbuster won’t charge for the streaming service itself, but you will have to pay to rent or buy movies. With the Netflix streaming service, customer can watch unlimited films for free, if they are Netflix subscribers.

Web-enabled TVs are just beginning to roll out, but are expected to quickly take over living rooms. Virtually every manufacturer has one on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and several are already on the market.

They offer a variety of new options for consumers, who can now watch anything from the streaming films of Blockbuster and Netflix to the latest YouTube postings, but they also represent another threat to the television networks, by offering an easy alternative to programming.

Microsoft, which has built a $20 billion business out of its MS Office suite of tools, has decided to give them away for free.

The company today announced plans to release a free version of its Office software that users can access over the Internet. The version will be released in the first half of next year, in conjunction with the retail release of Office 2010.

Versions of MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel will be available online.

It’s a surprising move by Microsoft, but one that was likely inevitable.

Office remains the dominant desktop software package on the market, but it has been fighting the move from desktop to Web for several years. In 1996, Google launched a free competing product online that has built a small, but notable, following of users. (Corporations have typically stuck with Microsoft’s products.)

The web applications will be ad supported, which is a slight deviation from Google’s model.

Don’t view this as a surrender by Microsoft or a capitulation to the inevitable. Businesses will likely stick with the desktop applications for the foreseeable future, with security of sensitive documents top of mind.

A migration to Web-based office software over the long term, though, is likely to continue – and this will begin to give the company a chance to establish a foothold and better position it against any threat from Google.

While the Grateful Dead didn’t mind recordings being made of their concerts, most musicians are a little less enthralled with the idea.

Not Rob Thomas. Whether it’s at his solo shows or his gigs with Matchbox 20, fans can pick up a copy of the live show they just attended on the way out the door – and do with them whatever they’d like.

The concerts, which are sold on Flash Micro SD wristbands, are just one of the digital tools Thomas is using to promote himself and his music these days, making him one of the industry leaders of digital marketing.

“Fans on the Web site are trading their favorite nights,” he says. “Some fans have gone so far as to make their version of a live greatest hits album. When you see that sort of application, you get closer to your fans.”

The wristbands not only bring in a little extra income, they help fight the inevitable. With cameras and recording equipment so small today, bootlegging is one of the facts of concert life. Fighting it is essentially repeating the industry’s folly with downloaded music in that it can alienate fans.  Embracing (and quietly controlling) it, though, establishes a bond.

“With YouTube, you can’t shy away from bootlegs,” says Thomas. “I’ve done a show and on the bus, I’m able to see parts of it on YouTube before we leave the venue. [But] I’ve got a great band and I’m proud of what we do. When people see it on YouTube, they say ‘oh I’d like to go see them live’.”

Beyond the wristbands, Thomas has also established a partnership with Research in Motion to launch the Blackberry’s first mobile artist app. And he is the premier artist on Atlantic Records’ Fanbase app for the iPhone, where fans can listen to clips, read lyrics, leave him voicemails, chat with other fans and see a feed of both official and unofficial news and photos. Coming soon are a pair of games: “Inner Beauty” and “Reverse Barbershop.”