LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman is once again talking about an eventual public offering for the business-oriented social network, following remarks and moves made this week by executives at Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. that indicate IPOs are the likely exit for their social media companies too.

"Probably at some point a balance will occur when that's the right thing," Hoffman told Reuters at an event in London on Wednesday. "That will not occur in the near term." The remarks echo comments made by Hoffman earlier in the year.

EBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) announced Friday that it has completed its spinoff of the Internet telephony unit to a consortium of investors that includes Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

The deal values Skype at $2.75 billion, with the investor group getting 70% of the company and eBay retaining the rest. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis also got a 14% slice of the company, after settling litigation between their latest project, Joltid Ltd., and Skype that alleged patent violations (The Deal Pipeline subscribers can read more about the settlement here). EBay said it got about $1.9 billion in cash and a $125 million note.

With its Dec. 9 spinoff from Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) looming, AOL LLC wants to be slim and trim once it goes solo.

In a filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL said it has informed its workforce that it wants to cut a third, or about 2,500, of employees. The company is asking employees to step up to the chopping block on their own (and presumably receive a buyout package), saying the cuts will be "conducted on a voluntary and involuntary basis."

"Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has a problem, and it's not a technical problem," said serial entrepreneur Keith Teare on Tuesday while speaking in New York on a panel about the future of search engines at Betaday, an annual event hosted by innovative incubator Betaworks for its portfolio companies.

Google is the undisputed champion of search in the page-driven world of the traditional Web, "but search in the world of messaging is still wide open," continued Teare, who is currently the CEO of Speedi.ly, a Betaworks-backed stealth-mode startup focused on "making sense of the real-time data stream."

The Wall Street Journal ran an intriguing article about the brewing competition between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and video game company Nintendo Co. (NTDOY.PK). It is the latest in a vein of stories about Apple's efforts to crack open the market for casual, mobile games via the iPhone and iPod Touch -- an initiative formally announced in September. So, might Apple have an eye for Nintendo?

As Dealscape noted in September, Apple has a history of supporting new product initiatives with acquisitions -- usually small ones. So far, however, Apple has strayed from that model, having made no purchases directly related to mobile games. The idea of Apple buying Nintendo is not a new one. As far back as 2006, the idea of Nintendo being in play was oft discussed in the blogosphere, and one rumored buyer was Apple. The logic behind an Apple purchase remains cogent today. The Nintendo Wii's unique motion-sensing interface -- not to mention its vast library of proprietary characters -- fits Steve Jobs' "Think Different" strategy. The catch of course is getting Jobs to think differently about acquisitions. Traditionally, Apple has executed small strategic purchases, nothing on the scale of Nintendo, which would likely exceed Nintendo's market cap of $36 billion.

European antitrust regulators have come out with their objections to Oracle Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ORCL) pending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA), as expected. Another not-so-big surprise: Oracle is coming out swinging.

In a statement issued Monday afternoon in response to the European Commission's objections (which Sun flagged in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission), Oracle accused the EC of having a "profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics." European regulators' primary concern is the effect that acquiring Sun's MySQL database management software unit will have on competition, as Oracle is a leader in the database market.

For Rupert Murdoch, new media has not been so kind to News Corp. (NYSE:NWS). A thinly sourced Financial Times story highlights how MySpace continues to drag down the media conglomerate -- which happens to also own the FT's chief rival, The Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch is also in the news Monday for telling reporters that when News Corp. launches its paid strategy, it will probably remove its sites from Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) search engine index.

IAC/InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) CEO Barry Diller is bullish on content production for the growing Internet and traditional broadcast television models. The brash executive is so excited about the area that he sees his firm getting more for less, saying he's willing to spend less than 10% of his company's $1.8 billion in cash reserves on deals for content production companies.

Diller's ambition to make small deals in content production companies was overshadowed Tuesday by his other announcement that he was willing to part ways with struggling search engine Ask.com.

Look for IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to unload its Ask.com search engine rather than confront what even chairman and CEO Barry Diller admitted Tuesday was a "speculative" future.

While a sale wouldn't deliver anything near the $1.85 billion that IAC paid to buy Ask.com predecessor Ask Jeeves five years ago, its fourth-ranking 3.9% share of the market has no doubt stirred up interest from search's top three.

Analysts expect solid performance from Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) third quarter results, due for disclosure at a conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET on Thursday. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average expect earnings of 33 cents per share on $5.03 billion in revenue.

In July, Amazon said it would acquire online shoe-seller Zappos.com Inc. for about $850 million in stock and cash. It's the online retailer's first major deal since it bought Audible.com Inc. for $300 million in 2008.

Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison apparently just couldn't sit around any longer and watch his prey -- in this case, Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) -- suffer.

Ellison, who said last month that every month the $7.4 billion acquisition is delayed amounts to a $100 million loss for Sun, visited Brussels yesterday for a meeting with European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes about the deal, according to a Bloomberg report.

No. 2 search engine provider Yahoo Inc.'s (NASDAQ:YHOO) third-quarter earnings, due Tuesday after the closing bell, are likely to stand in stark contrast to the stellar results announced by category-leading Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) last week.

Analysts anticipate that this will be the fourth consecutive quarter in which Yahoo's net revenue fell below the preceding quarter's, AP technology writer Michael Liedtke points out.

Analyst estimates for IBM Corp.'s (NYSE:IBM) third quarter have been rising over the last month, with the consensus now at $2.38 per share. The company reports earnings on Thursday.

"IBM has improved its gross profit margin in 19 of the last 20 quarters," reports iStockAnalyst. "That shows it has aggressively controlled costs while finding ways to squeeze more money from its products. Positive gross margin trend is likely to have continued in the September 2009 quarter as well."

As prospects brighten for IT spending next year, big hardware vendors have been coming out of the woodwork and laying the groundwork for growth with some big M&A plays. Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) struck its biggest deal in two years with Thursday's agreement to buy Tandberg ASA (TADBF.PK). Xerox Inc. (XRX) came out with its largest deal ever Monday with the $6.6 billion purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS), while last week Dell Inc. (DELL) offered $3.9 billion to acquire Perot Systems Corp. (PER).

Could the same be around the corner for the semiconductor sector? Conditions are starting to look up for chipmakers, which have been saddled with the worst downturn in demand for their products in over a decade. The industry's trade association noted Friday that industrywide sales last month were $19.1 billion, a 5% climb from July's figure. While that still represents a 16.1% decline from August 2008, the rate of decline is flattening.

Larry Ellison loves IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM), but what he'd love even more is to beat the technology giant on as many fronts as possible.

At a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday night, the Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) CEO idolized Thomas J. Watson, who developed IBM into one of the most powerful sales organizations and served as its president from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Fresh on the heels of buying ReCaptcha, Google Inc. (GOOG) is reportedly in the midst of snatching up Brightcove for between $500 million and $700 million.

The report seems to originate with a message sent on Twitter by Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab, who is known as @mediatwit on Twitter: "Source with knowledge of deal tells me video service Brightcove in talks with Google about buyout in $500m to $700m range," tweeted Glaser on Wednesday.

The Dolan family has tried on three occasions to take Cabelvision Systems Corp. (NYSE:CVC) private but failed. So would the Dolan family ever let go of their much beloved Cablevision? According to a feature in Barron's, it is a very real possibility.

The article suggests that the country's fifth-largest cable company could be an attractive takeover target now that it has decided to spin off its Madison Square Garden unit, which includes the New York arena, MSG Television Network, and the National Hockey League's New York Rangers and National Basketball Association's Knicks. Barron's says that a spinoff of MSG would make Cablevision's balance sheet much more attractive to both Wall Street investors and potential acquirers, Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ:CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE:TWC).