Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 19, 2008 – 10:12 am
Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
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
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Written on December 3, 2008 – 11:39 am
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”.
Written on December 3, 2008 – 2:04 am
Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Jonathan Miller a veteran of the Internet business is looking to raise funds to purchase Yahoo reports Reuters.
Yes, you may laugh at the possibility that one man may find the funds to official purchase the company, however Miller is no average man. He was CEO of AOL for four years and a founding partner of the Velocity Interactive Group investment firm, if there’s anyone out that can do it - he can.
According to Jessica E. Vascellaro of the WSJ, “Mr. Miller has been talking to private equity investors and sovereign wealth funds for months in hopes of raising money for a Yahoo deal.”
In regards to how much Miller is looking to raise, Vascellaro elaborated “Mr. Miller believes he can do a deal that would be worth around $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo shareholders . . . which would involve raising about $28 billion to $30 billion to purchase the entire company.”
With Yahoo’s stock currently at 11.50, it values the company at approx $15.94 billion which would be pretty favorable to Yahoo shareholders and board members. (more…)
Written on November 25, 2008 – 1:55 am
Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
News just in that Twitter has acquired Values of N, makers of popular notes app Sandy and Stikkit which will both be closing their doors on the 8th December.
I must admit, this is a surprise considering that only today were we made aware of the collapse of Facebook’s possible acquisition of Twitter.
Sadly, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see much integration of Sandy into Twitter (although you never know). The main motivation behind the purchase appears to be to ensure Twitter get their hands on Rael Dornfest, the Values of N founder.
Twitter have posted a blog post about the acquisition here. In the post they state
Values of n will be shutting down existing products. However, the technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter’s systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries. Nothing specific in this regard is planned but there is some smart work in there by the newest member of our engineering team.
Judging by the lack of updates to Twitter I highly doubt that we’ll see any of the Values of n’s features integrated. I am devastated to hear they will be shutting down all their services as well.
We’ve also come across a post from Rael Dornfest essentially saying “it’s been great, has been a lot of work by a lot of people but goodbye.” What a loss…
via TC
Written on September 19, 2008 – 3:17 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Cisco announced today its intention to buy privately held Jabber, a messaging software company. The deal is expected to close in the first half of Cisco’s fiscal-year 2009, and no financial terms were disclosed.
Jabber’s technology leverages open standards to provide a highly scalable architecture that supports the aggregation of presence information across different devices, users and applications. The technology also enables collaboration across many different presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo!.
The acquisition will enable Cisco to embed presence and messaging services “in the network” and provide rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions.
(Via Reuters)
Written on August 16, 2008 – 11:30 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Ernst-Jan has already written a piece about how useful the Quintura corporate blog is for keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in Eastern Europe and Russia. Now Yakov brings us this gem: apparently Czech search engine Seznam is talking to potential buyers about selling for a price exceeding $1 billion. Yes, that’s billion with a ‘b’ as in ‘big money’.
Google is cited as a potential acquirer, along with private equity firms Warburg Pincus, owner of Czech portal Centrum, and Macquarie Capital Alliance Group, owner of Czech yellow pages publisher Mediatel.
Seznam had 62% share of the Czech search market vs. Google’s 29% share. The site reported 4.4 million unique users in May 2008, and is estimating bringing in revenues of approx. $90 million this year, up 40% from 2007. The company was previously valued at $300 million after two private equity firms bought out Lycos Europe’s 30% stake for $91 million. The majority of shares is still in the hands of founder Ivo Lukačovič.
There seems to be a huge consolidation wave in the Czech internet landscape (see Yakov’s post for more on that), but if this deal goes through, it would make it one of the largest in the history of the Eastern European web scene alltogether.
Written on August 6, 2008 – 11:28 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Women are beautiful. Street photographer Garry Winogrand stated this in 1975 and he’s absolutely right. Online marketeers also agree with him and they don’t leave any chance unused to make some money out of their online presence.
Ask Glam Media, the publishing company that focuses on women and recently acquired ad agencies in the UK and Germany. But the big women marketing-related news of today is the $125 million dollar acquisition of online women’s magazine Daily Candy by Comcast.
Daily Candy - formerly owned by Pilot Group Ventures - sends its subscribers a daily email with tips, news, and info about fashion, food, travel and other glossy magazine-like topics.
Comcast was battling with Viacom to acquire DailyCandy, which allegedly makes 25 million dollars a year. Comcast has beaten the other advertising giant with 5 million dollars. Women are beautiful, especially in the world of online publishing.
Written on July 16, 2008 – 10:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A major acquisition and a round of funding sparked up the European travel industry yesterday. Expedia bought Italy-based Venere, German booking site Swoodoo received two million euros from Deutsche Telekom. How’s that for the peak season?
Expedia improves its European position
Chances are high that you’ve once booked a flight or hotel at US-based travel site Expedia, since it offers localized sites for most European countries and has many subsites like TripAdvisor and Hotels.com. The acquisition of Venere strengthens their position in Europe, as Venere lists about 29,000 hotels - mostly from this continent. 10,000 of these hotels were unavailable on Expedia, most of these new hotels for Expedia are based in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Financial details are undisclosed.
Deutsche Telekom works on web presence
The two-year old travel site Swoodoo was welcomed in the T-Online Ventures portfolio - the online division of Deutsche Telekom. Not with an acquisition, but with 2 million euros and upcoming cooperation with several of T-Online Ventures’s sub sites. Swoodoo will use the money for development, marketing, and growing beyond the borders Germany.
Is it the season?
So why do these strategic moves take place now? My simple guess: both sites have been performing really well in the hectic period before the summer. They’ve proved to be financial healthy and have enough traffic coming in. Reasons enough for Deutsche-Telekom and Expedia to make their moves.
Written on June 26, 2008 – 7:28 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
As reported by the Washington Post, Microsoft today announced it has made plans to acquire Braga, Portugal-based MobiComp, a mobile-data company founded in 2000. Up until now, I had never heard of the company (in fact, of any Portugese company in the realms of the mobile industry), but at first glance this sounds like a logical acquisition for Microsoft to make.
MobiComp has always been privately funded and boasts on its website that it has been profitable since its first year. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, we suspect this to be a nice home-run for founders Carlos Oliveira, Gastão Taveira and António Murta, especially since the company has apparently never taken outside investment.
With the mobile service industry growing fast thanks to new developments in the hardware and mobile internet access space, Microsoft is evidently looking to expand its services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division. The deal also reminds us of another European acquisition earlier this week, with Berlin-based Plazes being snapped up by Nokia.
MobiComp has developed several products Microsoft is likely to integrate with Windows Mobile sooner than later: MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker. The suite of products is primarily used by companies to back up data stored on mobile phones, submit content from mobile phones to social networks like Facebook, and access news and other mobile media. A noteworthy reference on their customer list is Nokia.
For your reference, fifty handset makers build on the Windows Mobile platform, and 160 mobile operators in 55 countries carry Windows Mobile phones.
Written on June 23, 2008 – 4:02 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
TechCrunch broke the news today: Nokia has acquired Berlin-based Plazes for an undisclosed amount. The service - founded by Felix Petersen - allows its users to track the places, activities and people in their lives. Sounds like Twitter and Jaiku right? But it isn’t completely the same, as the location is Plazes core feature. You don’t have to mention you’re in Berlin, it shows up in a Google map. Updates can be send by SMS or a mobile app (soon also on the iPhone).
Felix Petersen
There’s one other important difference though, while Twitter is U.S.-based and Finnish Jaiku was sucked up by Google, Plazes however, will remain European. Their first financial backing came from European private equity firm Doughty Hanson, which invested €2.7 million. The second round of funding DOES have an American touch to it, as Plazes received €1 million in total from Marc Andreessen (US), Esther Dyson (US), and Martin Varsavsky (Argentina). But that’s all there is. Plazes will stay in Berlin and remain member of the European tech family. And that is good for Europe. Just so you know, Loic Le Meur feels the same about it.
So what will happen next? Most likely, Plazes will become a standard Nokia app - installed on all its phones. Here’s what Felix himself (or his ghost blogger) writes:
The team is very excited to be able to further develop the Plazes service that is online today together with Nokia. If all goes well, in the near future plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices.
I hope geo localization is ready for its big break-through.
Wanna know how the Plazes office and Felix’ home looks like? Check the MTV Cribs-like video we shot in January.
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