Ebay Killing Vonage with Free SkypeOut?

As I wrote last week, I am very skeptical of Vonage's IPO. Now that Ebay / Skype have announced free calling to any phone within the US & Canada throughout the end of the year I think Vonage may be on the rocks... Not just the IPO, but the entire company. Vonage is burning so much capital that if they don't go public it isn't clear which institutional investors will put up the hundreds of millions of dollars ($225M to get through the rest of the year based on $75M losses through Q106 that Andy Kessler sites here) that it will require to keep Vonage going. It has been speculated that Vonage is merely posturing in an attempt to be acquired. One the one hand the acquisition strategy seems to make sense but on the other hand I can't really see how Vonage has any value at all given that its technology is rapidly being commodotized combined with the fact that is not anywhere near profitability.

technorati tags: Vonage, IPO, SkypeOut, Skype, Ebay