We were plagued all day today at the TechCrunch offices with a faulty Yammer Air app. Updates weren’t working or were seriously delayed, and most of us just moved over to the web version to get reliable service. We rely heavily on Yammer to communicate asynchronously across our very distributed team (three continents). I didn’t realize how heavily until today when the service wasn’t working properly.

I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem - it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.

Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.

We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.

In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.

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The NY Times is now confirming our report last week the sale of Skype to an investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz is imminent. The deal will be announced Tuesday, says Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, citing unnamed sources (perhaps people that…read our post last week).

As we reported, Index Ventures is also participating in the acquisition. And the unnamed private equity firm is apparently Silver Lake Partners, who is likely supplying the bulk of the capital needed to pay the $2 billion price tag.

eBay announced earlier this year that they would be spinning off the company in an initial public offering in 2010. These announcements are often made to generate acquisition offers from potential suitors.

The Andreeseen Horowitz fund can make single commitments of up to $50 million.

It isn’t clear if current Skype CEO Josh Silverman would continue to lead the company after any acquisition. Sources we’ve spoken with have said he is generally well thought of both within Skype/eBay as well as the possible investors.

More from our post last week:

Skype, under Silverman, grew revenue to $551 million last year, and eBay has said it expects the company to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011.

Presumably, the investor group, if successful in acquiring Skype, would run it privately and eventually prepare it for an initial public offering.

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, were also reportedly in talks with several private equity firms earlier this year to make a bid for the company.

Recent news that Skype is now in litigation with a company controlled by those founders over key Skype technology only complicates the picture further.

eBay acquired Skype in 2005 for $4.1 billion, although about $1 billion of that, an earnout, was never paid.

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[Update: the investor group has since announced it would buy 65 percent of Skype for $1.9 billion, valuing Skype at $2.75 billion]

eBay is expected to announce a deal on Tuesday to sell its Skype web-calling division to a group that includes Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, the New York Times reported.

The report cited two anonymous sources that said the investor buyout group includes Andreessen Horowitz, the new firm launched by Andreessen and Ben Horowitz this summer. The rumors, as yet unconfirmed, say that Other investors include London’s Index Ventures and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. This echoes last week’s rumor that an investor group including Andreessen was interested in buying Skype.

[Update: The deal places a value on Skype of $2.75 billion]

Andreessen is on eBay’s board. eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $3.1 billion. It outbid Google and Yahoo in a deal that ultimately has been viewed as one of the worst tech transactions of the decade. eBay has written off $900 million of Skype’s value, and eBay’s new chief executive, John Donahoe, has said that Skype isn’t a good fit with eBay’s e-commerce business.

Earlier this year, eBay announced it would spin Skype out in an initial public offering in 2010. Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, reportedly approached firms this year to make a bid. Google apparently walked away from a bid out of concern over litigation exposure, as well as the fact that owning Skype would alienate wireless carriers who are adopting Google’s Android cell phone software.

Opera Software just released the final version of Opera 10, the latest revamp of its pioneering-but-not-terribly-popular web browser.

Could this be the breakthrough Opera needs to reach a big audience in the United States? We’ve already written about how Opera is doing all right financially, but in the United States, it accounts for only 1.18 percent of the browser market, according to the W3Counter. (Opera accounts for a slightly higher percentage of VentureBeat visitors, but not much higher.) The company will need to make a big splash, or strike some big deals with computer makers, if it wants to grow much beyond that. I’m not sure there’s anything earth-shattering enough about Opera 10 to do that.

Still, Opera has also as led the way for other web browsers with some features — it was one of the first to adopt tabbed browsing, and also created the “speed dial” now also available in Chrome and Safari. So even if you don’t plan to download Opera 10 yourself, you may want to check out the company’s list of things you have to try (copied below), if only to see what features may be added to your browser of choice a few years down the road.

1. Opera Turbo, a new compression technology that solves the pain of slow connections. Whether you are an on-the-go business traveler, you rely on 3G cards in your netbook, or you find yourself stuck on a sluggish Wi-Fi connection Opera Turbo gives you a major browsing boost. If your network speed slows to a crawl, simply enable Opera Turbo to browse the Web at broadband-like speeds. Opera Turbo will automatically detect when network speeds will enable you to benefit. Once you turn it on, Opera Turbo instantly compresses pages, so less data needs to be transferred over a limited connection. Take the Opera Turbo test today. In our laboratory trials, Opera Turbo gives up to eight times faster Web surfing over slow connections than other browsers.
2. A sleek and beautiful interface. You have never seen an Opera browser that looks like this. For Opera 10 we gave the browser a streamlined and elegant new interface. The world-class design complements Opera’s world-class features that help you get even more out of your Web browsing.
3. Better tabs, from the original pioneer. Opera continues pioneering new ways to use tabs. In Opera 10, resize your tab bar by pulling down on it or double-clicking the handle, revealing a surprise: Opera now shows you full thumbnails of all your open tabs.

I’ve only had a copy of Opera 10 for a couple of hours, not enough to form any kind of informed opinion. But combine the features list, my limited experience playing with the browser so far, and some of my frustrations with Firefox 3.5’s bugs, and I’m intrigued. So I’m definitely going to continue giving Opera a try.

It’s also worth remembering that the Norwegian company’s hopes aren’t just invested in its PC web browser. It also has mobile browsers including Opera Mini, supposedly the most-downloaded app ever, and is developing Opera Unite, a service that’s supposed to turn your computer into a server.

Silicon Mitus raised a second round of funding for its business of making power management chips. The Seoul-based company stands out since relatively few chip startups are getting funding these days. Theamount wasn’t disclosed.

The firm is headed by Youm Huh, chief executive, and it makes custom chips for flat panel displays, mobile applications and energy-related hardware.

The round was led by ePlanet Ventures and participants included Walden International. Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden, said in a statement that Silicon Mitus exceeded his expectations for financial performance. The company raises its first round of institutional funding in 2007.

The Walt Disney Co. says it is acquiring Marvel Entertainment Inc. for $4 billion in cash and stock, bringing characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man into the Disney family.

Apple Inc said on Monday that it would host a media event next week, when the company is widely expected to unveil an updated line of iPod media players.

Looks like not everyone’s afraid of the ongoing shakeup of the venture capital industry. Khosla Ventures, the firm headed by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, has raised two funds totaling $1.1 billion to invest mostly into companies seeking to clean up the environment.

We already wrote that Khosla was raising the funds, but the New York Times has confirmed that he’s pulled together the money.

There’s a primary $800 million fund that Khosla will use to make investments of between $5 million and $15 million, plus a seed-stage fund of $275 million, from which he’ll make investments of around $2 million. Khosla Ventures previously invested Khosla’s own money, but this is the first time it has raised a fund from limited partners, making it the largest first-time venture capital fund raised since 1999. Both funds will focus on cleantech and information technology (IT).

This news is further evidence of Khosla’s contrarian streak: Not only is he talking about making big investments at a time when everyone is emphasizing smaller, safer deals, but he’s focusing on cleantech in a year when cleantech funding has fallen dramatically. Many observers had started to wonder whether Khola’s huge bets on cleantech in recent years were at risk. But after raising such a huge fund, he now arguably has the reserves to protect many of his investments. In his comments to The Times, Khosla downplays the risk.

“Clean-tech companies taking large amounts of money — that’s project finance, not technical risk,” he says.

Khosla also has announced two new general partners: former Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu (whose move to the firm had previously been reported but unconfirmed) and James Kim of CMEA Ventures.

I’ve emailed Khosla Ventures for confirmation and comment.

I do my fair share of complaining about poor service. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might say that I do more than my fair share. Here’s my issue: It’s not so much that your service sucks, it’s that you refuse to be held accountable for it sucking, and rarely, if ever, do anything about it. I’m looking at you, Comcast and AT&T. That’s why it’s so perplexingly wonderful when a company does the right thing, like Netflix.

Tonight, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for a Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred yesterday. They’re offering to refund 2% of users’ monthly bills back to them, if they simply click on the link that was emailed. It’s not a lot of money, but what’s remarkable is that Netflix did this for most of us completely unprompted.

Now, I’m sure someone somewhere complained, but rather than either arguing with that person or just quietly giving them some sort of discount, it looks like Netflix just emailed everyone that could have possibly seen this hiccup in service, and offered a refund — including users who didn’t suffer through it at all.

Refunding 2% of a monthly bill to all of these users will probably add up to a decent sized chunk of change (assuming a large portion of users click on the link), but the positive reaction they’re getting for the move on places like Twitter (and yes, this blog), has got to be worth more than whatever they’re paying. In a time of poor tech customer care, Netflix is the sterling example of how do it the right way.

Last month, we covered a Netflix internal presentation on how the company is run. It is simply an awesome guide that not nearly enough companies are anywhere close to following. It’s baffling how Netflix could be doing things so right, while there are so many companies out there doing things so wrong. It’d be one thing if Netflix wasn’t successful, but it’s extremely successful.

I’ve had basically no service from AT&T for large portions of my day in various parts of San Francisco for two months now. Do you think I’ll ever see a dime back from them? And before I just recently quit Comcast, my service would go out almost everyday without fail. Did I get an email apology and a refund? Nope. Maybe if I bitched loud enough for long enough, I could get something back from those two companies, but the point is that maybe I shouldn’t have to.

Netflix emails me from time to time to see about my movie streaming quality, and also to see if movies I’ve rented through the mail appear on time. If they don’t or the quality of my movies is poor, they apologize. That’s all I want. The refund is just icing on the cake. Too many other companies not only give you no icing, and no cake, but they steal your cake, punch you in the face, and then blame you for the whole ordeal.

But when it comes time to renew my plans with those companies, guess which one I’m going to stick with? Netflix. Companies often seem curious how other companies get “fanboys” — this is how.

[photo: TriStar Pictures]

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BeamME Pro, an iPhone application that makes it easy to exchange socially-networked information and build real-time intelligence on every new contact you make, has released a major update on the App Store. BeamMe Pro uses some of Apple’s new API’s to make contact sharing easier on the iPhone. BeamMe Pro, which doesn’t require user registration other then the download on the App Store, seamlessly formats your contact information.

Some of the key features in this release of beamMe Pro include contact mapping that enables you to track where you met people by viewing them on a map, a complete history of people you sent your contact info too, and a default Address Book integration. This feature is key because beamMe Pro will syncs seamlessly with your computer and other apps like Salesforce or Highrise without adding new software or complex processes.

The new version also includes Twitter integration that lets you gain followers automatically as you meet new people while keeping your contact information secure. And you can send your contact info to anyone on any device, whether or not they have beamMe Pro or even a smartphone. Additionally, there is a “Fun Zone” on the app where you can keep track of your networking stats, compare yourself against other professionals and complete challenges to help you raise your score and level within beamMe Pro.

What makes beamMe Pro so attractive compared to other contact sharing applications is that beamME Pro doesn’t have any ads, and has priority support for paying users.

BeamMe Pro is available for $1.99 in the App Store today.

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