Acquisitions: October 2007 Archives

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