The idea behind Rasba isn’t entirely new; others such as Kaboodle, ThisNext, StyleHive, and Wists have sought to bring a personal touch to online shopping. But whereas these other sites provide places for people to recommend goods sold elsewhere, Rasba serves as a storefront for retailers in addition to a social network for shoppers.

If you’re a consumer, you can create an account on Rasba, fill out your profile, and make friends. When you buy goods, they’ll go onto your profile alongside the retailers you’ve favorited. If your friends (or anyone else) happens to buy something after finding it on your page, you get a commission. This commission starts at 2% and goes up depending on how great an incentive a retailer wants to provide.

Conversely, if you want to sell merchandise online, you can create a retailer account on Rasba and set up your online storefront in a minimal number of steps. In this regard, Rasba can be compared to Etsy, which specializes in the sale of handmade goods. Rasba, on the other hand, provides mostly fashion but intends to branch out into all types of goods, such as electronics and toys.

There are a handful of useful goodies for both shoppers and retailers. Shoppers can make wishlists of things that they want their friends to buy for them. And retailers can track the activity on their store using a comprehensive analytics tool. Anybody who favorites these retailers will also show up on their pages as fans.

Miriam Brafman, the young founder of Rasba, didn’t have any programming knowledge when she came up with the idea for it. So she sought out developers through LinkedIn and other means. She now has a full-time Yahoo employee working on the site for her, presumably in his off hours. She spends most of her time these days traveling to meet with retailers who might want to set up shop on Rasba.

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Something big is brewing between Google and Ebay’s Skype, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Actually, for weeks now there have been low level rumors of the two companies talking, but nailing down any details was difficult. New information, however, suggests that they are in current talks and that a partnership or outright acquisition may be announced in the near future.

Skype, acquired in late 2005 for $3.1 billion, has been a financial albatross around Ebay’s neck. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

It’s clear that eBay wants to either unload Skype, or significantly drive performance.

Google, by contrast, is just beginning to think about how to dominate the voice space. They have a VOIP service through GTalk, a free 411 service and GrandCentral, a telephone management service they acquired last year for $50 million.

All of these products reside under VP Product Management Salar Kamangar and his new right hand guy, Bradley Horowitz. Other key players in the group are Wesley Chen, the product manager who championed the GrandCentral acquisition, and GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet.

That core team should be at the CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas, but we’ve heard that they either aren’t there or at the very least aren’t showing up for scheduled meetings (if anyone at the event sees them, let me know). That doesn’t mean the team is busy working on a partnership or acquisition of Skype instead of attending the conference. But given that we’ve heard from sources close to the deal that something is happening between the companies, it’s not a stretch, either.

What does Skype bring to the table? Scalable technology and a proven platform in the VOIP, VOIP2POTS and P2P Video, to start - 100 billion VOIP minutes have been logged on Skype to date. At any given time there are 10 million simultaneous users on Skype. Skype is the glue that can pull all the nascent Google products together.

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