When it rains, it pours. And eBay's recent billion-dollar writeoff of Skype, the VOIP startup it bought two years ago, could have an impact on Facebook's negotiations to sell a stake in the social network, at a high valuation, to Microsoft or another large backer. (Both Bernhard Warner and Kara Swisher make this observation, which I'll attribute to great minds thinking alike.) Skype's financial failure is a sobering reminder of the risks of overpaying for a startup. And all of a sudden, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is playing diffident, saying Facebook "might be a fad." But what may be forgotten in this latest skeptical turn to the hype cycle is that underpaying has risks, too.

Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is buying Navteq for $8.1 billion. The company's mapping service powers Google Maps, among others — including the Google Maps application for Apple's iPhone, a competitor to Nokia's handsets. (That's an exceedingly roundabout attack on a rival, but it's so obscure it just may work.) Nokia also says it will provide many more phones with GPS capabilities in 2008. [GigaOM]

3Com has agreed to be acquired by Bain Capital for about $2.2 billion in cash — a 44 percent premium over Thursday's closing price. Included in the deal is a minority stake in 3Com for Chinese network giant Huawei Technologies, which is getting control of H3C, the companies' joint venture. By shutting out Nortel, which also was interested in 3Com, Huawei prevents its Canadian rival from getting a foothold in its rapidly expanding home market. [WSJ]

Despite Microsoft and AT&T's lobbying efforts, senators expressed no outright opposition to Google's proposed purchase of DoubleClick at a hearing focused on the deal's potential threats to competition in the online-advertising market and consumer privacy. [AP]

Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded by Firefox creators Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, were paid in cash, not shares, when Facebook bought the company. While they doubled their money in the $4 million sale, the cash payout means they were shut out of Facebook's future growth, which has left some of them quietly grumbling. [TechCrunch]

What does EchoStar's $380 million deal to buy Sling Media mean? In some ways, Sling's decision to sell out seems odd. Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.'s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones — favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, may have a larger plan for Sling's Net-connected set-top boxes. "This is just the beginning," says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He's not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.

Nokia is leaping into the mobile advertising arena with its plans to acquire Enpocket, which sprinkles mobile Web pages with video and banner ads. With mobile phones seen as one of the great unmapped frontiers of advertising, Nokia is preparing to battle with other prospectors like AOL's Third Screen Media and Google, which just announced AdSense for Mobile. Of course the big problem, as Advertising Age points out, is that consumers are hardly begging for ads on their phones' cramped screens. But advertisers are attached to the long-held vision of location-based advertising, stalking their customers through the streets, pinging them with coupons for nearby stores.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out why Yahoo shelled out $350 million — $350 million! — to buy Zimbra, a mostly unremarkable, if well-reviewed, email-software startup. True, Zimbra's Web-based email has found a smallish customer base of Internet service providers, universities, and startups — a customer base which has been turning to Google's Gmail. By buying Zimbra, Yahoo might hope to protect its still-popular Yahoo Mail, and perhaps expand it to new markets. But that hardly seems like enough to justify the hefty purchase price. And then it hit me — this has nothing to do with email. Not really. Yahoo's Zimbra purchase is part of Sue Decker's ongoing upgrade of the troubled company's management.

Barry Diller is easily bored. First, he was entranced by the promise of e-commerce, assembling an empire that includes such diverse offerings as Evite, the Home Shopping Network, and Ticketmaster. Then he turned his attention to search and snapped up Ask.com. With such a motley portfolio, why not add a jack-of-all-trades videogame company to your portfolio? Diller, the CEO of holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp, is focusing his energies on the videogame sector now. By acquiring a majority stake in GarageGames, which does everything from development tools and game creation to indie game publishing, Diller hopes to complement the yet-to-be launched InstantAction.com. But as usual, Diller's strategic vision isn't matched by his grasp of the technical details.

Intel paid $110 million to acquire videogame-software toolmaker Havok, according to TVC Holding. The venture capital firm sold its stake for $21 million. [Gamesindustry]

Sir Richard Branson has dumped his Virigin Megastores — those emporia of old-school CDs — into the lap of Zavvi Entertainment Group. Stores in the United Kingdom will be rebranded "Zavvi" as early as November. Not even the ringle can keep Branson in the music retail business. [Gamesindustry]

Intel has snagged videogame programming tools provider Havok. Its "physics engine," among other software products, is widely used in the industry to simulate real-world motion inside games. Havok will continue to operate independently, but is likely to offer Intel-specific products to aid in the chipmaker's gaming arms race with AMD. Intel needs all the help it can purchase to drum up support for its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip. So how does Havok fit in?

Yahoo is spending $300 million in cold, hard cash to buy BlueLithium, an ad-targeting startup. If the rumors we hear are true, founder Gurbaksh Chahal, who's not sticking around for long after the acquisition, will find ways of spending that. [PaidContent]

For Wall Street, it's a juicy notion: Could Microsoft buy Research In Motion? It's the kind of high-concept idea that gets traders afroth and keeps analysts busy churning out reports. It's also — how to put this delicately — completely stupid. Yes, Microsoft could buy RIM — and yes, you could go out and buy a gun and shoot yourself in the face. Both are in the realm of possibility, and both are suicidal ideas.

We suspect Paul Graham will not be very popular in Sunnyvale today. The entrepreneur sold his e-commerce venture, Viaweb, to Yahoo for nearly $50 million in 1998 — a rich sum for the time. He's gone on to success coaching and funding other startups through his Y Combinator incubator. In a speech he gave to his latest hatchlings called "How Not to Die," on the mortal perils faced by startups, Graham makes a striking revelation. Even as he was negotiating the sale to Yahoo, Viaweb was on the verge of running out of money. Was Viaweb really worth $50 million? Or nothing? Then as now, in the Valley, there's a fine line between worthless and wealthy.

On Sand Hill Road, MILF stands for "mothers I'd like to fund." The mommy-blog frenzy among venture capitalists will likely be fueled by Johnson & Johnson's acquisition of Maya's Mom, a social network for mommies. Johnson & Johnson already owns advice site BabyCenter, making Maya's Mom a logical add-on. It would all be innocuous news if Maya's Mom was not swaddled in controversy, thanks to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

J.T. Wang, the chairman of Acer, looks like such a nice guy. But appearances are deceiving. The Taiwanese businessman is determined to keep his PC maker from becoming an also-ran. His company just announced plans to buy Gateway, the once-famed PC seller bruised by competition with Dell and Hewlett-Packard, for $710 million. The deal cuts at Chinese archrival Lenovo twice — first, by vaulting Acer past Lenovo into third place for PC market share. Second, by disrupting Lenovo's plans to buy Packard Bell, a fading PC brand that's still strong in Europe. Gateway, from a past acquisition, got rights of first refusal on any deal to buy Packard Bell — and Acer now plans to exercise those rights. Let's see — for a mere $710 million, Wang gets bragging rights, a bigger share of the vital U.S. market, and a way to bloody a rival's nose. Sounds cheap to me.

Our tipster was right that Fotolog, the New York-based photo-sharing site had been sold — but wrong, alas, about the buyer, and the price. We'd heard of a Latin American buyer paying north of $100 million. Instead, it's Hi-Media, a French Internet concern, paying $90 million in cash and stock — a rich price for a company with 10 million users but only $2.3 million in revenues projected for this year. Hi-media is publicly traded on the Euronext stock exchange, so its shares are as good as cash. But Fotolog backers 3i and BV Capital say they plan to hang onto their shares and "participate in the development" of the combined company. So now the most interesting question is, who cashed out? We wouldn't be shocked if CEO John Borthwick, above, and founder Scott Heiferman were among those receiving an immediate cash payout. Borthwick has a host of other startup ventures, and Heiferman is the CEO of Meetup.

It's odd, sometimes, the contortions reporters will go through to make a story out of nothing — especially when they miss the real one. Take, for example, this report from IDG News about the planned departure of Intuit CEO Steve Bennett. The subhead of the article: "Intuit chief executive's resignation is not tied to April tax database snafu." The first sentence: "Four months after a database problem prevented thousands of U.S. users from paying their taxes on time, Intuit Inc.'s chief executive announced plans to step down." Obsessed with an embarrassing, expensive, but ultimately meaningless, glitch in Intuit's tax-prep software, IDG misses what's interesting about Bennett stepping down in December to make way for Intuit SVP Brad Smith.

A source close to the company tells Valleywag that Fotolog, the social network and photo-sharing site, has been sold to a large Latin American company for an amount over $100 million. Fotolog CEO John Borthwick, who's on his way to Italy for a family vacation, hasn't returned a request for comment. Update: "As if," emails Fotolog cofounder Scott Heiferman. Still, the rumored sale, if true, makes eminent sense for Fotolog — and for Borthwick. Fotolog, though based in New York City, never took off in its home market. But overseas, especially in Latin America, it's huge. The site, which asks users to post a single photo every day, now counts more than 10 million members. While clearly successful, Fotolog is just one of many ventures for Borthwick, a former executive at AOL and Time Warner — and a sale would free him up to pursue those.