Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 30th June 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In an unexpected move, Torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay is being acquired by Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory X for $7.8 million (SEK 60 million).
Torrent freak broke the story and are reporting the deal should be sealed by August of this year. GGF claim to have to have the biggest network of internet cafes and gaming centers in the world, and plan to incorporate Peeralism into the business.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory X.
File-sharing technology company Peerialism, the technology behind ThePirateBay, will also be (more…)
Written on 24th June 2009
0 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Posterous, the email powered blogging platform has announced a rather interesting acquisition. The YCombinator startup has acquired fellow YC company Slinkset, the create your own social news site (Digg, Reddit etc..) tool.
Slinkset will remain functioning online, meanwhile Posterous plan on incorporate Slinkset into the site’s existing experience. Slinkset founder Brett Gibson will also join the fellow YC startup as part of the acquisition.
Posterous has gone from strength to strength over recent months, integrating a number of unique features seeing it slowly but surely become a incredibly powerful publishing platform it is own right. (more…)
Written on 5th May 2009
10 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Twitter acquisition drama continues, first it was Google and now, according to TechCrunch and Valleywag sources, Apple (?!). The plan is apparently to announce the acquisition at this years WWDC in San Jose.
The reason behind most peoples doubts is that its difficult to see how and where Twitter fits into the overall Apple setup and culture. Valleywag pinpoint the success of iPhone twitter applications as the main and ‘obvious’ driver for the deal, but I still don’t quite understand it.
Google, and Microsoft have been linked to possibly buying Twitter, Google just towards the end of last month. The Twitter founders apparently turned down Google’s cash and stock offer, and not to forget Facebook’s $500 million offer back in November.
As absurd a proposition as this may be however, there may be some truth and potential motive. In Apple’s eyes this could be there big moment, their grand opportunity to grab a stake in what is unquestionably the hottest internet product at this moment in time. Whilst Google slowly but surely builds their own social network, a move like this could catapult Apple ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft in in terms of internet footholds.
Also, and although extremely speculative, it is quite interesting how Apple decided to profile the site just last week. Finally, and I might simply be looking too deep into this, but @EV’s tweet yesterday immediately got me thinking, and that’s before even hearing about this rumour.
Arrington (Michael that is) is convinced the story is bull, despite making a meal of it on Techcrunch over the last few hours. But hey, that’s tech blogging for ya! :)
Written on 20th April 2009
3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Sun Microsystems directors have approved Oracle Corporation’s bid of $7.4 billion ($9.50 a share) or $5.6 billion after including debt.
I.B.M. recently concluded talks with Sun after I.B.M. lowered it’s offer from $10 to $9.40 a share.
Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said in a statement:
“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”
The company added that the acquisition of Java “is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired.”
The deal is expected to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval and other regulatory approvals.
More details to come as we get them.
Written on 15th April 2009
9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
This is uncanny.
Not minutes after we post about the most followed Twitter account (@cnnbrk) not being run by CNN, but rather a British entrepreneur James Cox – news breaks that the Twitter account has just been acquired, by CNN themselves.
We have been in touch with Cox and he has confirmed the news.
A full report on the story can be found here.
Written on 9th March 2009
11 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Social Media oriented tech blog Mashable have just announced the acquisition of micro-review service Blippr.
We reviewed Blippr back in July of last year, the service lets people reviews applications, books, games, movies and music in 160 characters or less. Mashable have already taken steps to integrate the service into Mashable.com by placing small face icons alongside mentions of services in their posts – a great way to drive traffic to the newly acquired service.
This is one of a number of new changes founder Pete Cashmore and his team have begun to roll out. Along with some design tune ups, Social Media Comments and an attempt at social advertising with Twitter Brand Sponsors – Cashmore seems keen on taking Mashable social media element to a different level.
This is in fact the second acquisition from a member of the Mashable team. The first came on the 14th March (almost exactly a year ago) where Adam Ostrow, Mashable’s Editor in Chief, acquired ReadBurner, a service that tracks the most shared stories via Google Reader.
Blippr as a service has a fair bit going for it, with a strong community and a relatively simple concept to boot, I can see the long term potential. The current integration of the service with Mashable rocks too, and clearly from an “apps” perspective, it’s an ingenious way to collect user feedback.
Techcrunch are the only other blog (that I’m aware of) to have acquired a web service. Arrington and his team acquired InviteShare back in 2007 but unfortunately that seems to have been the peak of it’s popularity.
Congratulations to Pete and the rest of the Mashable team.
Written on 24th February 2009
4 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Spanish social network Wamba has been acquired by New York based Latino entertainment community Mio.tv.
According to Techcrunch the company was acquired for approximately €4 Million, however other sources claim it’s closer to the €5million mark.
Wamba initially raised €3 million from Skype investor and recently bankrupt entrepreneur Morten Lund in 2007, however the acquisition should come as good news to Lund who retained 40% of Wamba shares.
With 8.4 million users, Wamba is in the third most popular social network in Spain, however it lies far behind the likes of Facebook and Tuenti who are in first and second respectively.
Written on 5th February 2009
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Tsavo, a company founded by userplane creator Michael Jones, has made another acquisition today acquiring Open Source Food, a recipe sharing site which was recently named in Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2008.
Open Source Food is a creation of Tokyo-based web entrepreneur and developer Jon Anthony ‘Yongfook’ Cockle, who launched the site on a meager $10k in 2007. It marks a great 2008 for Yongfook who also saw the launch of open source lifestream service Sweetcron to much fanfare.
Open Source Food will immediately be renamed NibbleDish (which it already redirects to) and will add to Tsavo’s other content oriented sites. Tsavo has previously acquired SEO and PPC firm Better Inc.
No figure has officially been announced for the acquisition.
Written on 19th December 2008
7 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In what I can only describe as surprising news, news aggregation service socialmedian is being acquired by linkedin competitor XING.
According to a post published this morning by SocialMedian founder Jason Goldberg, the entire socialmedian team will be joining XING. I assume this includes both their US and India based development team. Goldberg will be relocating to Hamburg as part of the agreement and will lead a “major new initiative” on behalf of his new company. Goldberg will also be given the newly created position of “VP XING Applications Platform” – responsible managing global partnerships on behalf of the XING network.
According to a blog post by current XING CEO Lars Hinrichs, SocialMedian makes a the ideal acquisition for the business social network because:
“In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.”
As yet, no word on the financials have been disclosed. TechCrunch reports $7.5 Million.
With currently over 6.5 million members, this marks another interesting landmark in publicly listed XING’s growth. We reported only a few weeks ago on the news of a change in CEO at XING and now with the news of this acquisition it marks another change in direction.
**Update**
We have an interview with Jason Goldberg regarding the acquisition.
More Info at:
Social Median Blog, XING blog, Official Press Release, TC, RWW
Written on 3rd December 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Everything is for sale if you pay the right price, right? Well, not Digg according to Jay Adelson who spoke with BusinessWeek recently. Digg’s new focus lies on becoming profitable as soon as possible. That of course is the right thing to say if you want to be bought.
On the other hand; Digg has reportedly been shopping itself around for years and rumors regularly surfaced about an impending sale. That sale never materialized and it could just be that Digg is running out of potential buyers. With the current state of the economy it makes a lot of sense to focus on revenues instead of an exit. Because it is common sense AND makes you more interesting for potential buyers.
Here are some of the new features Digg wants to add to increase traffic and revenue:
- sell ads on its RSS feeds
- keep costs reasonable
- focus more on the top-line revenue
- increase engagement on the site (by introducing new features)
- make Digg more social
- a revamped version of its search engine to offer more relevant search advertisements.
- International expansion by acquiring local Digg clones
Jay mentions there is ”probably a list of 15 to 20 things we want to do” in the following year. All to increase user interaction and thereby pageviews and revenue.
According to
Businessweek, in September, Jay said it had tripled revenues over the last year. In 2009, Adelson expects “another tripling if not more.” Earlier this year, Adelson wanted to reach profitability within two years. Now, he says, “it will hopefully happen within a year”.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
