Jamplant Limited, a U.K.-based private equity firm will buy Kelkoo for an amount of less than Euro 100 million (£85 million). Jamplant Ltd. was incorporated only last month and is an investment vehicle for the former management team of uSwitch.

Kelkoo, which was founded in 2000, had been bought by Yahoo! in 2004 for Euro 475 million (£315 million). At that time, Terry Semel, the then CEO of Yahoo!, had said that Kelkoo would “add depth and breadth” to Yahoo!’s consumer services.

An incompetent management team at Yahoo! is of course being blamed for the difference between the purchase and selling price of Kelkoo.

A spokesperson from Yahoo! said that the move to sell off Kelkoo was aimed at aligning costs with revenues and focusing on their core business under the present economic conditions. This seems to be just the reverse of what Microsoft, who took over a price comparison site Ciao, only last August is doing.

According to reports by Moneysupermarket.com, the market is heating up in the price comparison sector as more people look to save money, which is probably the reason Kelkoo has recently launched a cash-back scheme in the U.K. where their subscribers will receive up to 25% cash back if they shop online through one of the 500 online dealers affiliated to Kelkoo.

Kelkoo is currently the third largest e-commerce company in Europe, next only to Amazon and eBay, and has operations across 10 European countries.

Yahoo! Podcasts will be closed on October 31st. There was no official word about why this was done when the announcement was made on the site in the last week of September. According to TechCrunch, the arrival of video sounded the death knell for most podcast services.

However, this week, news has emerged that Yahoo! intends to sell Kelkoo, the European comparison shopping service. “It’s had its good and its bad points, to be quite frank,” Yahoo’s U.K. managing director, Glen Drury admitted to Forbes. He continued: “I think that Kelkoo and all its competitors need to really re-think the way that they’re going to run their businesses in the future.”

Perhaps the most surprising story, though, comes from Yahoo! Music. All technical development work has been halted in Yahoo!’s entertainment division. A skeletal crew will continue to maintain the various entertainment properties, which include MusicMatch, Launch and Yahoo! Music. However, the editorial and development functions are being reassigned to other groups.

Employees previously working on entertainment at the San Diego office of Yahoo! have mostly been reassigned to work on the email service. The company is reportedly focusing on ad platforms and email. Some perceive this to be a good move, because MusicMaster has not been very successful and the other entertainment groups aren’t contributing much in terms of revenue either at present.

Signs of trouble seem to be cropping up every few weeks at Yahoo! When a company starts shutting down and selling off assets with increasing frequency, like Yahoo! has, investors start taking notice. Whilst aligning themselves with their main money-making markets – search advertising and email – might be a good thing, one can’t help but wonder if they’re not already too late to fight against Google’s ever-growing dominance of the industry.