Czech search engine Seznam on the block for $1 billion or more?

Written on 16th August 2008                                                                                                              13 COMMENTS
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.

acquisition, czech republic, google, search, search engine, Seznam

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AnswerOil: product search and decision-making tool

Written on 12th March 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.

This week we’re interviewing Josh Tabin, founder of PrismaStar. That’s a Czech software company that uses a patent-pending consumer-profiling technology to help consumers find products and services, personalized to their own individual needs. Basically they want to save you the hassle of navigating through sea of mass market advertising and mega stores. Their site is rather overwhelming, due to truck loads of information. So I’m glad Josh took the time to participate in our weekly series to explain what his company is about and how he developed it.

How did you come up with the idea of Prismastar?

“It’s really simple; I couldn’t find the products I wanted and searching for product information online was more frustrating and time-consuming than helpful. No results found, too many results, non-relevant results, too much scrolling, too many pages, bad data etcetera etcetera. And I wasn’t the only one having these problems. So, for more than three years we researched how people really make decisions and created AnswerOil™. Now people everywhere can make better and faster decisions when AnswerOil is deployed on their Websites, in-store kiosks, and even mobile applications.” (more…)

czech republic, ecommerce, five questions for start-ups, prismastar, products

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