Frequent visitors probably noticed the new header and graphic on the site. I’ve been tweaking it and playing with customizing wordpress in a small way the last few days. Most of it on the admin end so you guys probably would not see it.

More importantly, I thought I kill two birds with one stone. First, the default graphics for the site was a little drab so I decided to spruce it up. Secondly, I was always intriqued by elance so I put up a RFP on the site requesting design help on the site.

A week of intense bidding later, I selected Stephen from Romania for the job. $80 dollars and 3 weeks of working virtually and between time zones later, here it is. . . . my own web makeover. As I expected, Stephen was 2-3 times cheaper than American bids and 30% cheaper than many Indian firms/freelancers.

I talked about the advent of “Armchair Entrepreneurship” before and I think this is a perfect example. On elance, I can get a logo made and a website built for around $200. If I have some sort of web application in mind, it might cost around $4,000. All readily accessible for people with a regular 9-5 job and no engineering degree. No need to run around craigslist trying to find a “co-founder” anymore. (ofcourse there are IP issues you have to weigh by going to an freelancer in another country.)

As the legend goes, ten years ago, Pierre spent his labor day weekend coding eBay. Look at it today. If you cant hack or dont know engineer friends, perhaps you can spend your next labor day weekend, scribling out screenshots for the next next big thing then posting on elance to get it build. Might take a little longer than Pierre but the process works nonetheless. After that, pull out your credit card, go on Google, and buy some clicks and you’ll be all set to have your own island in a few years

(ok its not that easy, but I think you get my point)

Now this is interesting. . . “eBay in talks to buy Skype, report says” from Reuters and Walls Street Journal.

I wrote a while back on the applications for Skype in the e-commerce space - as a payment mechanism to support pay per call classified amongst other “payment” applications. If you look at Kijiji China (an eBay company), they have already integrated “voice” as an inbound mechanism for creating listings, using it for lead generation is not so far fetched as well in countries where PC’s are not very “personal” (ie, shared via cyber cafes) but the phone is personal and ubiquitous.

Anyways, eventhough I work at eBay, I do not have additional insights or information outside of the articles I read publically. Just postulating like everyone else - Fred Wilson, Silicon Beat, Andy, Om, Infectious Greed . . . plus I might get in trouble if I go on my usual rambling. . .