The IRS wants to enforce rules that require employees to pay taxes on personal calls made on their company-supplied cell phones, according to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal. The issues stems from a 1989 law that says employees are supposed to count personal calls on company phones as income and pay taxes on them. The IRS regards company cell phones as a benefit that could be counted as part of an employee’s taxable income, rather than a necessary tool for work. Like any taxation debate, the issue is confusing, but the bottom line is that figuring out which calls are work-related and which calls are personal would take more time and money than employers want to spend.

That’s because thanks to Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, presence awareness and a host of other technology tools, we no longer conduct business solely on business equipment during standard office hours; we conduct business everywhere, all the time. This makes cell phones a necessary tool for many employees 24/7 (we can debate the merits of that later). For example, I have a cell phone that GigaOM reimburses me for, on which I make all my calls. The company benefits because having that one phone means I check my email on weekends and accept many phone calls from sources well into the evening. Continue »

Twitter might be Oprah’s new tech love, but it goes without saying — she loves Skype, the Internet calling service that makes an appearance on her show pretty much every day. She is going to reaffirm her love for Skype on Thursday, May 21, 2009, in an episode called “Where the Skype Are You?”. The show will have videos from different locations around the world. And later, Skype President Josh Silverman will be making an appearance on the show to talk to Oprah about Skype and how to use it.

Second Life creator Linden Lab will announce on Wednesday that SL users have generated 15 billion voice minutes on their internal avatar-to-avatar VoIP service since the product was launched 18 months ago, and are now forecast to do 15 billion total voice minutes in 2009. By contrast, Skype handled 65 billion total voice minutes last year, according to parent company eBay (PDF).

Since Skype users aren’t usually communicating with each other in a virtual world, this might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, Linden has been emphasizing Second Life’s voice chat feature as a utility for educators and corporations with an SL presence who use it to conduct in-world conferences and other voice-driven applications. And tomorrow, the company will also announce a battery of voice services usable outside SL, including “AvaLine,” which enables mobile phone-to-avatar calling.

Linden VP Joe Miller told me the company believes this puts it in competition with Skype. Judging by SL’s high voice usage rates, it’s certainly a niche competitor. Then again, with Second Life’s roughly 750,000 monthly users compared to Skype’s 42 million-plus daily users, it’ll be a long time if ever that the VoIP giant feels the virtual pressure.

Just as AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is conceding to the permanent loss of wireline revenue, high definition (HD) is emerging as a way to save the all-but-abandoned asset. HD finally gives customers of AT&T and other telcos a reason to retain wireline connections, for while the somewhat better voice quality associated with wireline already provides some resistance to cord-cutting, HD yields wireline telephone calls that sound dramatically better. The HD “being there” experience can make wireline an essential service, for everyone from deal-making lawyers to texting teens. Continue »

Kara Swisher reported earlier today that Tellme founder Mike McCue is leaving Microsoft at the end of June 2009. His Tellme co-founder, Angus Davis, is leaving the company as well. He sent out an email to his friends and family, shortly after announcing the news to the Tellme team. I’ve covered the speech-recognition company from when it was started to the day it became part of Microsoft after the software giant bought it for a rumored $800 million. Microsoft has plans to use voice as a mobile phone interface. Mike and Angus went through some serious ups and downs with Tellme. It was a deal with AT&T that helped Tellme get its mojo. I don’t think their exit disrupts Tellme’s operations. My question is, what do they do next?

What a deal! Verizon Communications today unveiled plans to dump roughly 14 percent of its expensive copper lines in exchange for $8.6 billion from Frontier Communications. The transaction, which is expected to close within the next year, will make Frontier the nation’s fifth-largest incumbent local exchange carrier with more than 7 million access lines, 8.6 million voice and broadband connections and 16,000 employees in 27 states.

The big winner here is Verizon, which has been trying to sell off its rural access lines for years. It sold 1.5 million of them to Fairpoint in 2007, which is now struggling under the burden. In 2004, Verizon sold its access lines in Hawaii to The Carlyle Group. The resulting Carlyle-created business, Hawaiian Telecom, filed for bankruptcy last year.  Buying copper land lines is proving to be a sucker’s game. Continue »

One thing is for sure: eBay, a disaster of an Internet company, really wants to rectify its megabillion-dollar mistake and get rid of Skype — even if it means taking a small haircut. But eBay CEO John Donahoe thinks the company is worth much more than $2 billion figure being thrown around by analysts, calling that valuation “low.” He is ignoring the fact that eBay doesn’t own the core IP for Skype and is in a legal tussle with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Of course, eBay spent $2.6 billion on Skype, so one can’t expect Donahoe to publicly admit that they got suckered and overpaid.

eBay hopes to spin out Skype in 2010. I chatted with Sarah Lacy on Yahoo Tech Ticker earlier this week (watch the video) about Skype’s IPO and why it could be a strong offering, unless of course the founders show up with a bunch of cash to buy it back. The company has been posting strong growth in recent months.