• 16,000 number of free tickets given out for Joe Paterno’s memorial, which happens this afternoon
• $98,000 the amount some of the tickets have gone for on eBay — before eBay took the sales down source

• » Greed over grieving: With Paterno so highly regarded in the Penn State community, it only makes sense that there’s a lot of demand for these tickets. “It took only minutes more for pairs of the tickets to start showing up on eBay,” the Centre Daily Times pointed out. But, thing is, eBay has a rule where you can’t sell tickets you got for free for money. So many of the ticket sales got taken down. Suggestion to all: Don’t sell tickets for a memorial. A guy died. It’s not the Super Bowl. (Thanks Time’s Moneyland for the tip)

• $4,999.99 buy his pants source

• Microsoft really wanted this. Microsoft right now is trying to do things to keep up with other faster-growing technology companies.
• Bahl & Gaynor Inc. money manager Matt McCormick • Explaining why Microsoft went after Skype — offering a reported $8.5 billion for the company. They offered that much because they had to. Skype reportedly rebuffed any offers that were less than $7 billion. Steve Ballmer, during the announcement of the deal, suggested that the technology would be used for, among other things, its Xbox console, Office technology, Windows Mobile phones (where they could gain a real advantage, by the way) and corporate phone software. Skype is so widely-used that Microsoft could be sitting on the next generation of phone technology — something they need to stay in the game. (Also, a side note: Google was the only other serious bidder, but they didn’t get close to $7 billion.) source

• $7 billion for Microsoft to prove that they’re still in the game source

• » The deal is close: Reports suggest a deal could be reached by Tuesday, which of course would be big. See, Skype has a huge userbase — around 663 million users — and they make billions of minutes worth of VOIP calls each year. Clearly Microsoft would be a better choice to own this company than eBay, but then again, anyone would’ve been a better choice than eBay.

• facebook was the most-visited website this year. That is, of course, if you consider each Google offshoot site (Maps, Gmail) a separate website. If you count all Google properties, though, the search engine giant shoots up to #1, comprising 9.85% of all US visits. Some more weird bits: eBay was pushed out of the top ten by Bing (people actually use Bing?), and “facebook login” was the 2nd most-searched term of the year, which is odd, because it’s not like the login box on Facebook.com is terribly hard to find. source

• Someone was gonna call them out for this at some point, and it might as well be WePay, a competitor which focuses on setting up group payments (rather than PayPal’s person-to-person payments). They put this giant block of ice outside of a PayPal developer conference in San Francisco earlier today. Publicity stunt? Sure. But PayPal has only been freezing accounts without cause for years, and what a way to call them out on it. source

• $302k every day
• $8,490 every hour
• $141 every minute source

• $109 million the amount Bloomberg spent on his high-spending 2009 NYC mayoral campaign
• $119 million the amount Whitman, the ex-eBay CEO, is spending on her California gubernatorial campaign source

• $500,000 amount she spends daily

The result all that money creates

• 51% the tally the former eBay chairman has going into the GOP primary
• 25% the tally her challenger, Steve Poizner, has in the poll
• 24%haven’t made up their minds or plan to go for a minor candidate source