eBay Buys Zong for $240 Million........WTF?

eBay bought Zong. Paid $240,000,000.00. Huh?

WTF is Zong?

Zong is a service that allows you to pay for things with your smartphone. The cost of things purchased appears on your bill. When buying things using Zong, you put in your cell # and then you get a text from Zong and have to reply with a PIN # and then you pay for the item on your next cell phone bill.

Zong is also the first international brand of China Mobile being launched in Pakistan. Huh?

Zong is also a massacre where there was a mass killing of African slaves that took place in 1781 on the Zong, which was a British slave ship. Huh?

I know I'm not up on everything in web 7.0 (or whatever number they're calling it now), but really, Zong? I asked several people today and nobody has heard of it. I tried to do my research (I quit after 5 articles). I get the general premise. You pay with your phone. How that is much different than any other service, I sorta get. How it is worth $240,000,000.00 is what I don't understand.

Was eBay buying a patent? I don't know, the "mainstream media" didn't say. I'm just thinking that eBay should have been able to develop their own similar system or enhance Paypal's own system for $240 million. Heck, they could have even hired 239 engineers from Google and paid them $1,000,000.00 for a year to come up with something and still saved a million dollars.

Like I said, I read 5 articles on the deal. Didn't learn much, but still givin' my opinion anyways. This just seems like another Skype deal - paid waaaayyy too much money for something that really isn't worth it. Perhaps they were just buying out a potential competitor...I don't know, at least that would make it make sense a bit. I'm not going to break it down and go into the math like I used to, but just think about it for a minute, think about how many million transactions they will need to process before they even pay for the purchase of the company...not to mention all the overhead, wages, marketing, integration engineering, etc. after the purchase until it makes a profit.