Tech Business Update: Skype’s DEAL With MACH, AT&T’s SPECTRUM Purchases

Skype (NASDAQ:MSFT) is setting up an arrangement with the financial clearing provider MACH that will permit Skype credit purchases to be directly charged to mobile phone bills. This could be yet another phase in the VoIP giant’s emergence as a leading carrier in its own right. TeleGeography calculates that Skype, for which Microsoft paid $8.5 billion, accounted for one-third of all long-distance traffic in 2011.

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A Bloomberg tally of the spectrum acquisitions involving AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) arrives at a total of deals worth $2.6 billion, with 24 transactions proposed in the past four months alone. The communications giant is playing catchup with Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) and also trying to process the increasing amount of data that subscribers are downloading.

Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) is said to have had talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (NYSE:TSM) along with other Taiwanese chip foundries, about possible formations of partnerships, reports Chief Executive Mark Durcan. Micron provides commodity memory, which implies that outsourcing dynamic random access memory and flash manufacturing is unlikely. However, it is currently thought that Micron could join with another manufacturer to supply solid-state drive controller chips or hybrid memory cubes, or to develop 3D transistor technology.

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