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We in the U.S. love to complain. Take this week’s introduction of Skype for the iPhone. The mobile VoIP client appears to be a pretty solid offering, letting you not only chat with your Skype buddies, but also make voice calls—as long as you’re using the Wi-Fi connection, a stipulation Apple had pointed out way back in March 2008when it first unveiled the iPhone SDK.

That didn’t stop the barrage of complaints that the ban on 3G was arbitrary and designed only to support AT&T’s business model. Which, to be fair, is pretty accurate. Whether or not that makes it wrong, well, that’s up to higher powers to decide. But at least we’re better off than the folks in Germany, where the country’s official provider, T-Mobile, wants to ban use of the Skype app on both its 3G network and its extensive Wi-Fi hot spot network.

Not only has T-Mobile said that the use of Skype is forbidden, but it’s also declared its intent to cancel the contracts of any users who use workarounds to run the program anyway. The company’s reasoning is that the program’s high data use would choke the network infrastructure and that it violates the customer contract, prohibiting VoIP—a clause apparently used by all other German mobile service providers as well.

Skype’s general counsel fired back in a blog post, saying: “They pretend that their action has to do with technical concerns: this is baseless. Skype works perfectly well on iPhone, as hundreds of thousands of people globally can already readily attest.”

Whatever the case, T-Mobile looks to have a steep road ahead of itself, as Skype is currently the top free app on the German App Store.

The fate of eBay-owned Skype has been in question for months now. Back in April, it looked as if eBay was going to spin-off the VoIP service as a publicly traded company. Now we’ve learned that Skype will be sold to private investors.

According to the New York Times, eBay will announce a deal tomorrow that will send the popular Internet telephone service to an investment group. It seems as if the group includes the newly formed Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, co-founded by Netscape’s founder Marc Andreessen. The deal terms are not yet disclosed.

This deal comes during a very public battle between eBay and the founders of Skype, who are threatening to cut off one of the key peer-to-peer technologies that power Skypeand have expressed interest in rebuying their company. It’s even possible they are also part of the sale – we just don’t know yet.

We’ll bring you more information as it develops.

Update: Others involved in the deal include Index Ventures (London venture capital firm, early Skype investor) and Silver Lake Partners (private equity firm).

So you can show off your PDFs

Google Docs has been given a key new piece of functionality, allowing people to embed files like PDFs and PowerPoint presentations directly in their web pages without a download.

Google’s cloud based docs are growing in popularity as the internet giant adds functionality like the ability to view PowerPoint and TIFF documents without having to download the.

And now people will be able to bring this embedded viewer to their own websites and blogs.

Fast and clean

“Viewing files right in your browser is fast, and it keeps your downloads folder clean,” explains Google on the official Google Docs blog.

“Plus, it spares you the hassle of saving your files to the machine you’re using, which could be a shared or public computer.

“Starting today, we’re opening up this technology to all webmasters and blog owners with the Google Docs viewer. All you have to do is give the URL of a PDF, PowerPoint or TIFF document to us and we’ll display it directly in your browser with no download required.”