"StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust," said Michael Buhr, senior director, eBay. "StumbleUpon's downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay."
Driven by word-of-mouth, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent year over year and delivers approximately five million new recommendations a day to its large, highly engaged user base. StumbleUpon allows people to discover Web sites, people, videos, product information, communities and other online content based on personal interests. By allowing its community to rate the content, StumbleUpon gets smarter as it is used and provides an increasing level of relevance over time.
Said Garrett Camp, chief architect and one of three StumbleUpon founders, "We're excited about joining eBay, as we share the same values around community and we look forward to working with them to accelerate our growth."
StumbleUpon has about 2.3 million users according to eBay. Epicenter blogs one use StumbleUpon may have for eBay in the battle against the large search engine leaders.
Om Malik points out an interesting scenario for the new acquisiton: "By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google's dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take." A great observation, because we all know, no matter how many denials we all hear, the number game in Silicon Valley now is: Find a way to do significant business online "without" Google's involvement, and you'll have found the goose that lays the golden eggs.
StumbleUpon also has a lot of young users that eBay probably hopes will come and use its online auction service. Ebay's acquisition of StumbleUpon has been rumored over a month ago.
Ebay has 
