Recently in Acquisitions Category

Interesting article on What Google, Yahoo, Microsoft look for when buying a start-up. I really liked this part about Yahoo!: Last year the company looked at 500 companies, put 50 on a short list, fully examined 20, and finally acquired 9 companies

TechCrunch reports that Plaxo is bought not by Google, but by Comcast.  The price tag is close to what was rumored before - $175M.  Why Comcast?  God knows.

Plaxo had $5M revenue in 2006, $10-$12M in 2007, and 2008 projections are $20-$25M. They have 1.8M visitors per month.

Well, today's news is too big to ignore.  Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo! again.  This time it's different though:  Yahoo! is suffering, their outlook is not good, and Jerry Yang did not convince anybody that he's really doing something about it.

So what's the deal?  $31 per share or $44.6B total valuation for Yahoo!.  That's way more than what market closed on yesterday.  So my guess?  This time Yahoo! will take it.  It's to their benefit - things do not look good and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.  They know that they have lost the war to Google, and this is their only chance of changing the game.  A combined Microsoft + Yahoo! will have a large impact on the competition, numbers say.

Also see Steve Balmer's memo to Microsoft employees on the subject.

Sun bought MySQL for $1B, Oracle - after all the fuss - bought BAE for $8.5B, Apple announced MacBook Air.

Bobby Fischer - the chessmaster - is dead, and Netscape - the first browser (well, technically speaking Mosaic was the first one), will not be supported anymore, AOL is dropping it.

Yahoo! seems to be laying off people, which Slide got a valuation of around half a Billion.

Wordpress increased the free storage size it gives each blogger to 3GB - that's from 50MB.

Top moving or sinking sites of 2007 from Compete

And WB has announced that it would support Blu-ray exclusively, so the war - just like VHS vs Betamax - has started to shake out...

TechChrunch has done a great job of writing up a what-are-you-thinking about the announcement from InstaColl regarding Live Documents (for which they did not bother to buy livedocuments.com by the way - the domain is live-documents.com).  Read the TechCrunch Live Documents coverage here.

This is not a "news" item to post here, but I'm posting it because I'm very interested in hearing the future of this company/service.  It is very obvious that the service is very late in the game, there is not much (if any) differentiation, and the calculation of the potential revenue is, how should I put it, stupid.  Sorry.  But it's coming from the founder of Hotmail, so the connections are there.  I'm just curious to see if despite all the "no way" signs around Live Documents, we will see them acquired by one of the big guys (Microsoft?) a year down the line...  I will not be surprised.

Yes I'm behind - traveling back from Orange County and LA was exhausting with all the fire and burning going on.  I was not that close to the fire, but seeing the smoke circles going up both in Irvine and in the Valley was sad and horrifying.

So I'll have some blogging to do, but this one is hot off the press...  The official press release is out.  Microsoft invests $240M in Facebook for 2% of the company.  I guess Google did Facebook some good.  The bidding landed Facebook a great valuation, and Microsoft was not in the auction to lose.  But then hey, as somebody said, Microsoft has the money in the bank and $240M to them is just "rounding error".

So far the Web 2.0 Summit in SF has been pretty uneventful.  Even the interview with Facebook's Zuckerberg did not have much interesting or newsworthy information.  Steve ballmer, however, is clearly announcing that Microsoft is in acquisition mode, so that's good to know.

Also people are making a big deal out of Murdoch/DeWolfe talk about MySpace opening up its platform.  Well, what else did you expect?  Sure they'll do it.  And they did not announce that it's there now - it's coming in the next few months, whatever that means...

I have to say I had not heard of Jaiku before - but apparently it's a twitter competitor and already there is all kinds of rumors and speculations as to why Jaiku and not twitter - some are saying Yahoo! is about to acuire twitter.  Anyhow, here's the official announcement on Google Blog.

I got to know Brian Smith (www.comparisonengines.com) during the early days of Frucall, and I have loved his work ever since.  In addition to being a great person, he is a real journalist, and is excellent at finding bits and pieces of information, putting them together, and giving you a story that is worth reading.

A few weeks ago he wrote about Jellyfish's "Smack" feature, and suggested that Jellyfish is a target for acquisition.  Admittedly I did not take it seriously (my bad, Brian!) - and what do you know...  Less than a month later Microsoft acquires them.  The suggestion was not explicit enough to make me feel Brian had inside information, I think his article was his assessment.

Anyhow, I saw the news a few days ago but did not a chance to blog it until just now.  So I went back to Brian's site to get the link to his article, and I saw his post covering the acquisition.  You should definitely read it - a lot of good information, both on the Microsoft/Jellyfish deal, and on acquisition landscape in the comparison shopping market.

Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity mainly because of its online word processor, Buzzword.  Buzzword is a flash-based RIA which competes with Google docs.  As you have probably heard, Microsoft has also announced their plans for what they call "Office Online" (creative name, by the way!).  So the market for web-based documents is certainly getting hotter.  This acquisition is a surprise because Adobe was not in this market, although Buzzword makes sense to Adobe being a flash-based technology.  You can find a detailed account of Buzzword here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=393