Boot up: Skype acquires GroupMe, HP's 'long-decade departure', and more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates (right) discuss the future following the purchase of Skype by Microsoft. Photograph: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images

A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

"Skype will acquire group messaging service GroupMe, a service that was born at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci."

What the Guardian thinks of software patents.

Horace Dediu: "But that's the nature of unforeseeable growth: you cannot foresee what will happen and plans never work out. Data and planning don't help. The lesson is that you need to plan for that which cannot be planned. When you are at your peak you must assume failure is imminent and when you are at the trough you must assume success is inevitable.
"All failures of strategy are rooted in the assumption that outcomes are predictable."

Robert Scoble: "If you want to be a leading platform today you MUST get third-party developers on your side. To rub that in a bit, today I was hanging out with Photobucket's CEO, Tom Munro. I asked him what he thought about the HP news. You can listen in on that conversation here.
"Don't know why Photobucket is relevant? They have nine billion photos. Flickr only has five billion. They just made a deal with Twitter to become the photo sharing system underneath Twitter. Twitter made a deal with Apple to become the official social network for iOS. IE, he's now the official photo sharing guy for Apple's iPhone and iPad.
"Developers like him keep telling me 'Apple is first in my mind, Google is second, and I don't have time for #3, but if I do, looks like Microsoft has the best future.'"

Google has been looking at malware attacks, with a big report: "The report looks at a number of evasion and defensive techniques employed by attackers and malware distributors and concluded that not only are the bad guys quite skilled at adapting to new behaviors by users and browsers, they're also doing some of their own innovation. One of the more interesting findings in the report is that socially engineered malware--the kind that uses various tricks to goad users into visiting a site or downloading a file--make up barely 2% of all malware observed by Google. The volume of socially engineered malware has been rising steadily during the course of the last few years, but Google's engineers said it's still a tiny piece of the overall picture."

From March; worth reading again in the light of HP's withdrawal from the tablet market.

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