The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘acquisition’

Since it launched last July at our Realtime Stream CrunchUp, Brizzly has been one of the best web-based Twitter apps. It offers support for viewing pictures inline, shortened link expansion, multiple Twitter accounts, and even some Facebook support. But they’ve been quiet in recent months. Now we know why.

The Brizzly team went into hibernation because they made a couple of acquisitions, and have been working on a new feature. First, they bought one of my favorite Twitter iPhone apps, Birdfeed. One of the earliest apps to gain Twitter geolocation support, I had been worrying that Birdfeed would go extinct because developer Buzz Andersen recently joined Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment startup, Square. But since the acquisition (which actually occurred in the November/December timeframe), Andersen has been working closely with the Brizzly team to wrap the app in its new skin.

And it’s more than just a new skin, as Brizzly for the iPhone, the app gained support for posting pictures to the service (or using Flickr), Twitter Lists, and tab editing to better customize the app. Also, if you are on a tweet page that has a photo link attached, you’ll be able to see a preview of that photo. It’s a robust client that stands among the best for the iPhone. And it has a bonus feature: News.

The News tab on the iPhone app actually ties in to the big new feature for Brizzly itself: Brizzly Guide. Previously, Brizzly’s website had an area on the side where users could explain the current trending topics on Twitter. Now, that area is a larger site, Brizzly Guide, which gives you more detail about the trending topics. This is actually quite useful as a source of news information because it can tell you both quickly and rather throughly why something is trending. For example, this page for Chuck Norris shows his name is trending because today is his 70th birthday. The page includes images (in this case, of Norris), and links to other relevant information about him. It also has an except from Wikipedia to tell you more.

These Brizzly Guides are all community-built, like Wikipedia. Anyone (with a Brizzly account) can edit them at anytime. Top contributors are displayed at the bottom of the Guide site, as are top trends this week. You can also search these guides, to look up previously hot topics.

The other acquisition Brizzly made could potentially be very interesting in the long run: Wikirank. Though the service was shut down a little while ago so that the team behind Small Batch Inc. (its parent) could focus on their new project, Typekit (which aims to better fonts to the web), it remained an interesting one. As a visualization and analytics tool for Wikipedia, Wikirank showed data in interesting ways that offered insight not seen on the face of Wikipedia itself. Though Brizzly co-founder Jason Shellen isn’t yet sure what they’re going to do with Wikirank, the idea will probably be along the lines of visualization and analytics of this Brizzly Guide information.

Shellen also notes that Brizzly signed an enterprise agreement for Typekit so that they can use it on Brizzly Guide.

Something else Brizzly has been working on: a new idea called “Picnics” (here’s an example). Basically, this allows someone to pick out tweets from the public Twitter stream and respond to them in a different, but still public, environment. Brizzly tested out the idea the other night during the hit Fox show House (frequent House director Greg Yaitanes is an investor in Brizzly parent Thing Labs), and Fox even promoted it. Actor Jesse Spencer (who plays Dr. Robert Chase on the show) responded to tweets directed at him as they came in.

While Picnic isn’t ready for a full-scale roll-out just yet, Shellen notes that it “should prove to really transformative for us in the near future – expect to see more picnics in the future.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, something else Brizzly has been working on recently: a new round of funding. Stay tuned.

Find the free Brizzly iPhone app in the App Store here.

Social gaming company Playdom has acquired Facebook game developer Offbeat Creations. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Offbeat Creations has developed several popular apps on Facebook including Super Farkle. The acquisition will obviously boost Playdom’s presence on Facebook. The gaming company has largely been known as dominant on social network MySpace. Playdom’s lineup of games included Sorority Life, Mobsters 2, Lil Farm Life, Tiki Farm, Tiki Resort, Wild Ones and Poker Palace.

Offbeat Creations’ founders will join Playdom in leadership roles in Playdom’s Seattle offices. In November, Playdom raised a massive $43 million at a $260 million valuation. As we reported at that time, Playdom’s presence on MySpace was strong. Their Mob Wars game has 14 million or so users there, and the company was likely pulling in $60 million or more in revenue at that time.

According to our stats from November, Playdom has 28 million monthly game users. 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook. They have twelve MySpace apps and 6 Facebook Apps. This acquisition should boost their number of Facebook apps. Offbeat Creations says that its games on Facebook currently exceed one million monthly users. Playdom’s main competitor is gaming giant Zynga, which is a leading game developer on Facebook.

All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published. There were WordPress plug-ins that did this before, but now WordPress is doing it automatically for all hosted blogs.

PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting for your RSS reader to ping the servers for each blog and news site you subscribe to, which can cause a noticeable delay before it actually shows up in your feed reader, it will now be pushed out immediately.

The PuSH protocol does away with the constant polling required by RSS. Another way to speed up RSS is through a different protocol called RSSCloud, which WordPress also supports. There are subtle differences between RSSCloud and PuSH, the most significant being that RSSCloud just notifies your feed reader there is something new, while PuSH actually sends the content with the notification via so-called fat pings.

Google Reader also supports PuSH, so if you use Google Reader, all WordPress blogs will be updated much faster than before. Not that you’d necessarily notice unless you just came from a blog’s site or saw a link on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or some other stream first. Let us know in comments if you notice any difference to how fast TechCrunch posts appear in Google Reader.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

Excuse me while I let off a little steam. I was a tad hasty in my proclamation yesterday that the TiVo Premiere changes everything. It doesn’t. In fact, it doesn’t change anything. It’s a big pile of disappointment and missed opportunity

Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has agreed to acquire CoTweet, a young company that offers a tool that enables multiple people to communicate on Twitter through corporate accounts.

CoTweet will continue to operate from San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget, essentially taking charge of the company’s social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and CEO Jesse Engle will lead the San Francisco operation and head ExactTarget’s new “social media lab”.

Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but we’re digging.

CoTweet was founded in 2008 and offers a browser-based collaboration platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard, support multiple editors, track conversations, assign roles and create follow-up tasks. Its high-profile customers include Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Ford, Dell and Pepsi, among others.

The company raised just over $1 million in seed capital from Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund, The Founders Fund, Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo also managed to squeeze in a quote in the official press release, saying that he sees the acquisition as a “strong validation that valuable, sustainable businesses are emerging from the Twitter ecosystem”.

ExactTarget claims annual contracted revenue of around $114 million for 2009, a year in which it raised a staggering $145 million in venture capital. The company employs more than 600 people, recently opened an office in London and counts Nike, Best Buy and UMG among its clients. You can read the company’s letter to its customers here.

Today, Google is testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law to address internet freedom and censorship, particularly calling attention to the recent security and censorship issues in both China and Iran. Google’s Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong is presenting testimony on behalf of the search giant, which we’ve embedded below.

Much of the testimony outlines the background on what happened in the China security breach, where the Gmail accounts of human rights activists were breached by hackers in China. The attacks were systematic and also extended to 20 other companies, including Intel. Google is unwilling to shed light on who initiated the attacks because the investigation is ongoing.

Of course, Google has dealt with censorship and security issues with many countries in past. Wong says that over 25 governments have blocked Google services in the past. YouTube has been blocked by 13 countries including Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Blogger and Blog Spot have been blocked by India, Pakistan, and Spain. Gmail was recently banned in Iran. And Orkut has been blocked by Iran and Saudi Arabia.

You can watch the hearing live here.

Google has acquired online photo editing site Picnik, according to a blog post made by the photo editing startup today. Google also announced the acquisition on its blog. The entirety of Picnik’s blog post is embedded below.Terms of the deal were not disclosed in either posts.

Picnik is one of the fastest growing photo sites on the web. Picnik is a powerful, cloud-based photo editor that is integrated directly into Flickr, SmugMug and other photo repositories. Interestingly, Picnik is Flickr’s default photo editor. I’m assuming that will discontinue with the acquisition. It would make sense that Google would fold Picnik’s technology into its photo sharing product and Flickr competitor Picasa, which has some basic editing offerings but doesn’t compare to Picnik’s vast editing technologies.

Competing online photo editors include Fotoflexer and Photoshop.com.Picnik offers a base version of its photo editor for free, and subscription model for a more feature-rich offering. When we spoke to the startup’s CEO Jonathan Sposato a year ago, Picnik was cashflow positive, a little more than two years after launch.

Google is on a bit of a shopping spree; the search giant bought iPhone email app reMail, and social search startup Aardvark in a matter of weeks.

When Bitnik, Inc was created, our founders envisioned making great software for real people and giving users the power to edit digital photos in their browser, without having to purchase or download complicated software. While our first office in 2005 only had two desks, today we’ve grown to 20 employees and have become the world’s most fun online photo editor, with millions of visitors every month. As we’ve grown together over the years, we’ve worked hard to build a company of great people creating great software. We think our emphasis on strong partnerships, a fun culture and you, our users, is what has made Picnik so awesome.

And all this leads us to today’s exciting news: we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so say tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on. We want to thank you all for being great users, pushing us to grow and do big things. So thank you all for your continued support, and Happy Picniking!

We called it. IAC’s Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We originally reported on the deal last week. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Match.com said the acquisition is more of a “value acquisition than a strategic one” and Singlesnet will continue to be run as an independent business. Singlesnet’s traffic, says Match,com, is declining but could present new monetization opportunities for “Match.com’s collective portfolio of domestic online dating brands.”

Adrian Ong, who joined Match.com from Soulmates Technology, will lead Singlesnet. The acquisition isn’t surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

Although traffic is declining, Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.

Twitter is becoming a serious marketing vehicle for local businesses. Everyone from your local baker to your favorite restaurant is getting on Twitter to talk to customers and draw in new ones. Just last weekend when I was driving to Vermont with my family, I sent out a Tweet asking for a good place to eat lunch. I got more than five responses, including one from a local innkeeper couple recommending two spots in town (not owned by them). That was in Brattleboro, Vermont.

But that was so random. How do you even find out which of your favorite local businesses have Twitter accounts or what their Twitter handles are? Well, CitySearch is doing it for you. The local business guide is starting to build out a definitive directory of Twitter accounts and Tweets about local restaurants, hotels, spas and stores. It is starting small, with about 5,000 business listings currently tied to their Twitter accounts (which businesses can add themselves when they claim their CitySearch page), but its aim is to add Tweets by and about any of the 15 million businesses in its listings.

Every page on CitySerach now prominently highlights a Twitter Buzz widget on the upper right hand corner of the page showing recent Tweets about businesses in your city. If the business has a known Twitter handle, recent Tweets with their @handle (their Twitter name) will show up above the user reviews. These include both Tweets from the business and Tweets that mention the business. For instance, apparently people love @artichokepizza and the “calzones are off the chain too!” Chelsea Piers also gets a lot of Tweets.

“It really lowers the threshold for reviews,” CitySearch senior VP Kara Nortman tells me. It also makes the reviews more immediate, and therefore relevant. I’d much rather know how a chef’s Mahi-Mahi is going over with diners today than last week when a different chef might have ben on duty. Since it started rolling out the local Tweets a couple of weeks ago, engagement metrics are noticeably higher across the site: session durations are up 10 percent, pageviews per visit are up 7 percent, and exit rates are down about 3 percent.

In addition to being able to look up businesses by name, CitySearch has Twitter directories of local businesses by city. So far there are only 820 in New York City and 281 in San Francisco , but CitySearch is just getting going. Any business with a Twitter account can add their account to their CitySearch page. In fact, they can sign up for a Twitter account while they are at it right from within CitySearch and use CitySearch as a Twitter client. Also, right now CitySearch is only showing Tweets that explicitly mention the @handle a business uses on Twitter. Over the next few weeks, CitySearch will start to surface Tweets that mention the business whether or not the @handle is used. So those 5,000 listings should expand quickly.

Nortman says that the Twitter business directory was inspired by CrunchBase, our own directory of startups, people, and venture capital firms. She wants it to become the definitive directory of Twitter business accounts. CitySearch is in a unique position to build this because it already has millions of local businesses in its database. All it needs to do is associate Twitter accounts and related Tweets to each business, and it can slice and dice them by city, neighborhood, or type of business. An update of its iPhone app which is making its way through the App Store approval process right now will double as a Twitter client and let you Tweet out your reviews from the app. It will even have a social tab showing all the Tweets about a business (see leaked screenshot at right). Sentiment analysis is also on its way, which will let consumers see which restaurants and stores are trending with positive or negative vibes lately.

Once the Twitter directory is built out, it and the resulting Tweet stream will become available to developers through its new CityGrid APIs. It could also make it easy for consumers to create Twitter lists of their favorite local shops and restaurants, or curate their own lists and maybe even charge on a clickthrough basis. But maybe it should wait for Twitter to define its advertising rules before committing to any one model.

hi5, one of the world’s most popular social networks, has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. Today, the company is furthering this strategy with the acquisition of social gaming developer Big Six. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. See the full release below.

Big Six’s founders, Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, will join the hi5 management team. Hi5 says the deal will boost the social networks efforts in developing in commerce platforms and payment processing offerings. Right now, gaming is a central part of hi5’s strategy for growth so it makes sens for the social network to acquire innovative technologies and talent. The games section of hi5’s site accounts for around 1/3 of the site’s traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5’s revenue.

Apart from the currency and payments technology, Big Six’s social gaming platform will also become part of hi5. With the massive success of Zynga and Playfish, it makes sense that hi5 would try to create a social network that centers around gaming itself. hi5 has over 60 million members, which is a far cry from Facebook’s 400 million users.

In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.

hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced the acquisition of social gaming company Big Six. The Austin-based company was founded by gaming veterans Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, all of whom will join the hi5 management team, as announced separately today.

The deal enhances hi5’s growing leadership in commerce for virtual goods and games. Building on hi5’s current commerce platform, which includes a global virtual currency called hi5 Coins, support for over 60 payment methods worldwide, and new advertising-based transactional capabilities – the Big Six acquisition brings significant new technology and software platforms in the areas of payment processing, fraud detection and conversion optimization. In addition to its proprietary commerce platform, Big Six also designed a social gaming platform which will become part of the core hi5 site.

“The Big Six team and technology are a perfect complement to what we have already developed at hi5,” said Bill Gossman, CEO of hi5. “Over the last two years, we have made a substantial investment in building out the industry’s most robust commerce infrastructure for virtual goods and gaming and this acquisition will considerably augment both our commerce platform and domain expertise.”

“We are excited to be joining a company that shares our philosophy and vision for how social gaming will evolve,” said Kevin Gliner, co-founder and CEO, Big Six. “This deal is a perfect match because it enables us to accelerate our go-to-market plans by leveraging hi5’s huge global audience.”