Joost board chairman and previous company CEO Mike Volpi has been removed from the Joost board by shareholder vote and his actions while CEO and chairman are being investigated.

Joost is an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). During 2007-8 Joost used peer-to-peer TV technology to distribute content to their Mozilla-based desktop player; in late 2008 the Joost product was migrated to use a Flash-based Web player instead. Volpi left his post as Joost CEO a few months ago, according to a CNET story.

He took a new position in July as a partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm. Index Ventures is part of the consortium that earlier this month signed a deal with eBay to acquire a 65 percent stake in Skype, with eBay retaining 35 percent. There have been a number of reports recently that  Zennström and Friis were trying to put together a deal to buy back Skype from eBay.

Volpi’s ouster was announced in London, in a statement which included the following: “Mr. Volpi was removed from the board of directors and from his position as chairman of Joost by shareholder vote. The company and its board of directors is conducting an investigation into Mr. Volpi’s actions during his tenure as CEO and as chairman.” A story in Great Britain speculated that the investigation is believed to be about intellectual property issues.

The relationship between the Skype founders and eBay has not been a happy one thus far. eBay purchased Skype in 2006, paying a total of $2.6 billion.  Zennström and Friis, however, apparently maintained the rights to some of the technology used by the Skype system, having invested it in a newly formed company which they called Joltid. This left eBay in a questionable position relative to the Skype technology and they have filed suit against Joltid to insure that they own all of the technology necessary to operate the Skype system. Since ownership of that technology is uncertain, eBay has said that they are building new software to be used to operate Skype.

Volpi has been involved in what looks to be a number of sides of this story. When taken together with the British report that his ouster involved intellectual property rights issues, it seems likely that there will be new developments in the Skype-eBay-Joltid-Volpi situation in the near future. What has been a muddy picture since the sale of Skype seems to be getting more opaque by the minute. The Volpi development may begin to make a bit more sense of it as more information comes to light.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 at 9:12 pm under Ecommerce, Internet, Legal.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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