On November 28, it was announced that NeuStar Inc. has
acquired UK-based mobile instant message provider, Followap Inc. for $139 million in cash. This acquisition was inspired by NeuStar’s prediction that Followap’s revenues for 2007 should be $25 million and should double the year after. In 2001, Followap raised $12 million in a second round of funding. The companies that have all invested in Followap include Sequoia Capital, Carmel Vetures, Koor Corporate Venture Capital, SVM Star Ventures Israel and Siemens Venture Capital [source].

NeuStar was created to face the technical challenges in the telecommunications sector ever since the U.S. government granted portability of local numbers in 1996. Today NeuStar is a global telecommunication company service provider that provides services such as network optimization and inter-network call origination and termination. NeuStar also provides services that relate to wireless data and VoIP.

Followap has over 160 million subscribers within 17 network operators and offers “Presence” services as well as instant messaging capability to these subscribers. Followap’s product line was launched in 1999 is based in the United Kingdom. “Followap furthers NeuStar’s strategy by extending and complementing our current beachhead initiatives in new growth markets such as the GSM Association root DNS service, the acquisition of UltraDNS and the development of the SIP-IX service [source].”

Also in the official press release of the acquisition, the GSM Association (Global System for Mobile Communications) stated that personal instant messaging communication will enhance capabilities to over 1.2 billion mobile phone users, will generate over $60 billion in revenues for telecommunication companies, and will account for over 1 trillion messages sent across mobile phones. Normally, I don’t write about the happenings of the telecommunications industry, but I felt that these numbers are staggering and this information needed to be shared.

During my college years, I felt that the reasons why you received certain grades were based on two factors: how hard you worked on the class and how uptight your professor was or wasn’t. Pick-A-Prof aims to help you solve one of those problems by providing professor ratings and the ability to network with other people in your classes using through Facebook using the Facebook API available on Facebook Developers.

“Research has shown that students who take classes and study with their friends are more likely to attend class and get better grades. Our goal is to encompass both the academic and social aspects of class selection to provide students with everything they need to succeed. This was an obvious step towards this goal,” stated Chris Chilek, Co-founder of Pick-A-Prof. Pick-A-Prof displays statistics of classes being signed up for at your University. Pick-A-Prof also displays the proportion of the grade distribution for those classes in its previous semesters.

Since Pick-A-Prof’s inception, over 250,000 relationships have been formed and the Facebook integration aspect of the website is expected to enable the website to grow beyond over its current approximation of 1 million Pick-A-Prof users count.

In regards to the Facebook integration, John Cunningham, another Pick-A-Prof co-founder stated: “Merging the two most frequently used methods of class selection seems like a natural fit. The new service will really help students find courses they can excel in”

After reading the press release for this website on Yahoo! Finance, I decided to give the website a try and provide you some details and opinions about what the site is like. The first feature I noticed was the navigation system of the internal pages of Pick-A-Prof:

There are four tabs: Home, My Schedule, Prof & Courses, and Book Exchange. The Home page tab allows you to view your account information such as your school associations, login information, and personal information such as your address. The Home page tab also allows you to display your Facebook friends who are signed up in the same classes as you and who isn’t signed up in the same classes as you. For this feature to work, you have to fill out the your schedule under the My Schedule tab.

Under the Profs & Courses tab, there is a Browse Courses tab which displays the acronyms for the classes that are available at your University:

I believe that these courses are pulled from the Facebook courses database list. When you select a certain course, the user interface allows you to automatically add it to your Pick-A-Prof schedule. When you put your mouse over the icons in the screenshot below, a pull-down menu asks you which semester you would like to add that course into for your My Schedule.

In the Write Reviews section, Pick-A-Prof allows you to find your professors through search. To test this out, I did a search on “Obst.” Norman Obst is the funny, yet informative Intro to Macroeconomics teacher I had at Michigan State. Here is the details from his profile:

All reviews that contain profanity are monitored by Pick-A-Prof administrators and removed out of respect for the professors.

The last feature that I’ll point out on Pick-A-Prof is the Book Exchange. Through Pick-A-Prof, users can compare prices that is gathered from many mainstream websites, sell books, and even reserve books at select campus book stores.

After reviewing all of the above features, I would have to say that Pick-A-Prof is the greatest product using Facebook Developer API. The more I was writing about this site, I wished I could have used such a website during my college years. Pick-A-Prof’s slogan should be, “I saved a ton of money on my books by switching to Pick-A-Prof.”

Today, Ari Steinberg, a Development Platform team member of Facebook announced that Facebook now has a Toolbar available for Mozilla Firefox 2. The toolbar page is found here.

After the toolbar is successfully installed, Facebook redirects your browser to a page that displays an image explaining how to operate the toolbar:

The Facebook toolbar has a search feature. When you click on it, a pop-up asks you to login to your account. After you log in, the toolbar becomes fully prepared to respond to the commands. In the quick links pull-down menu, you can access your profile, friends, photos, shares, notes, groups, events, and messages all in one click. In the search box, you can type the name of people that you are searching for. One of the most useful features is the Share button on the toolbar. The Share button makes bookmarking websites on Facebook efficient. Below is a screenshot of the Toolbar:

Another nice feature about the Toolbar is the sidebar that comes along with it.  The sidebar lists all of your friends and grabs any news feed updates that feature your friends.

The Facebook Toolbar is part of the open source Facebook Developers initiative, so users can view the code used to create the Toolbar and modify it.  It is not yet known whether the Toolbar will be available for Internet Explorer soon.

Today, India-based travel planning website, Travelguru has received $15 million in funding from Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital India. This second round investment “is the largest investment in one single round in the consumer internet space in India yet.”

“The new round of investments will help us strengthen our reach through delivering retail experience to our consumer base as well as in making continued investments to maintain our high level of customer satisfaction and service,” stated Ashwin Damera, the Founder of Travelguru. “The second round of funding from Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital reaffirms the growing confidence in Travelguru’s team and leadership position in the Indian travel and tourism industry” added Damera.

Earlier this year, Travelguru had received $10 million from Sequoia Capital India as a first round investment. This is Battery Ventures’ first investment in an Indian Internet company. “We are very happy to announce our first major investment in the consumer internet space in India with Travelguru. Given our experience in technology in general and consumer internet specifically, we selectively look for companies with a few key ingredients: companies that address large markets, have very strong leadership, and have shown they can deliver innovative offerings as well as execute on sales and marketing,” stated Mark Sherman, General Partner of Battery Ventures.

One of Travelguru’s competitors, MakeMyTrip.com is also working on raising a major investment. MakeMyTrip is expecting to receive $10-$12 million shortly.

Travelguru is similar to Travelocity and Expedia in the fact that it searches for discount prices on hotel accomodations, flights, etc. As an experienced user of MakeMyTrip, I was impressed by the ease of booking tickets within India by such websites. Through MakeMyTrip, I was able to find a one-way ticket from Bangalore to Delhi on premium airline, King Fisher for 3,000 rupees and normally the price of flying this airline on the same route is over 8,000 rupees. The current dollar-rupee conversion rate is 1 USD-44.54 INR. At this conversion rate, a total investment of $25 million will drastically improve Travelguru operations.

Exaroom.com announced today that the company would be introducing a new web widget and customizable profile features.  Exaroom is a social network that provides file-sharing services as a key feature as well.  The file-sharing aspect is a service that most other social networks do not provide.  File-sharing was definetely one of the reasons why exaroom witnessed and maintained attention since mid-August:

“Our goal is to create a social network where you can easily, securely, and responsibly share files,” stated Song Kim, founder of exaroom. “Our new user profile page brings us a step closer to creating this community.” The new widget feature that exaroom provides also allows cross-compatibility with MySpace and exaroom.  MySpace users can embed the examroom widgets on their MySpace profiles.

To test out the social network and its features, I created an account.  As soon as I registered for the website, I was sent an e-mail from Major Tom, who becomes your first exaroom virtual friend.  The e-mail explains how to go about navigating around exaroom, including the use of Ground Control, the file sharing software that needs to be installed within your browser if you want to be able to upload files. 

Another unique feature that exaroom has includes the option to select themes.  I selected the paradise theme in the screenshot below.  Every user is assigned a direct URL and a blog URL.  Every user also has an option for a photo gallery on their exaroom profile page and also has a guestbook.  I was mostly interested in how the widget works.

I was mostly interested in how the widget works, but did not want to install extra software, so I checked out the Ground Control page to see how it works.  It appears that in order for you to share your files, you have to keep the Ground Control software running on your computer so that you can download your share files remotely through the widget.

Here is a screenshot of what Ground Control looks like:

Below is what the widget looks like when you embed them onto websites.  The default scrolling message on the computer is “username’s computer is online,” but I changed it to Amit’s Widget.  Exaroom provides you with the HTML code to embed the widget on the widget page.

By mashing together the functionalities of social networking and file-sharing, I believe that exaroom has created a great product.  I could definetely see this technology carry exaroom to a much higher position against the current dominating social networks.  File-sharing is becoming increasingly important for the on-the-go type of people. 

On the Google Blog today, Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher announced that Google Answers will no longer be accepting new questions.  Google Answers was one of Google’s first products and was proposed by Google founder, Larry Page.  The 4 person team working on Google answers created Google Answers in less than 4 months. 

Google Answers has categorized and subcategorized the question’s answers by the type of discussions.  For example, in the Business and Money section, there is an Economics subcategory, and in this section there is a question about the typical allowance for a college student.

When submitting a question for Google Answers, users also entered how much they were willing to pay for an answer from the question researchers.  Poor answers given for paid questions required a refund application.  Questions that were locked meant that researchers were digging for information pertaining to the question.  Google had employed the Answers Researchers themselves and these employees go through a screening process.

On November 18, 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “As Yahoo Falters, Executive’s Memo Calls for Overhaul.” The article then went on to becoming dubbed “The Peanut Butter Manifesto” as an analogy that the company has been spreading themselves thin with all the resources (including acquisitions) that the company owns.

The internal document was written by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo! senior VP. The document was to provide the same motivation that J. Allard used on his Zune team with the article that I wrote earlier and the “Features, not products” initiative brought upon by Google’s Sergey Brin.

In acknowledgment of the need for change for Yahoo! about utilizing their resources, I decided to focus a blog post on the properties that Yahoo! has purchased since 1997 and where they are now. This way it will give you a better idea of what Yahoo! has to work with.

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1.) Net Controls Corporation

Net Controls Corporation was Yahoo!’s first major acquisition. Net Controls Corporation developed software that was the basis of the My Yahoo! Ticker. The premise of Net Controls’ product was to provide a customized stock, sports, and weather ticker in the Microsoft Windows operating systems taskbar. Although the Net Controls homepage is down, I was able to find archives of it on Archive.org. Check out the homepage archived from April 13, 1997. 

2.) Four11

Yahoo!’s purchase of Four11 for $92 million has now evolved into Yahoo! People Search . Yahoo! People Search seems to have remained the same since the purchase as its only functions are to search people by their first and last name, address, e-mail address, and phone number. Here is a link to Four11’s homepage on April 1998 (about 6 months after being acquired).

3.) Classic Games

The acquisition of ClassicGames.com brought Yahoo! into the realm of online gaming. Yahoo! Games which was partially powered by ClassicGames.com is now a place for users to download all types games for about $19.99 per game. Back then, ClassicGames.com was a website where users could play a few select Java-based multiplayer games such as Hearts, Spades, and Euchre. To see another move Yahoo! made to penetrate the massive gaming market, also look into the acquisition of The All Seeing Eye below.

4.) Viaweb

Viaweb was the first application service provider which allowed users without technical expertise to develop an online store. The website was created by Robert Morris and Paul Graham and was started in 1995. Viaweb was written in Lisp, the second oldest high-level programming language after Fortran. Yahoo bought Viaweb for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock valued at $45 million and since then, Viaweb has evolved into Yahoo! Store.

5.) WebCal Corporation

WebCal Corporation was transformed into what is now known as Yahoo! Calendar. WebCal calendar software was web based and allowed users to customize the look-and-feel of their calendars. The technology was based on the Standard Event Entry and Distribution (SEED) architecture. Any event organizer was also allowed to enter/edit events securely into the EventCal database anywhere in the world. WebCal also used the EventEngine webcrawler to add public events from the web.

6.) Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc.

Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. was acquired by Yahoo! on October 12, 1998 for 280,664 shares of Yahoo! common stock. Yoyodyne was an interactive direct marketing Internet-based company. “The acquisition combines Yoyodyne’s extensive database of self-selected consumers and its expertise and proven ability in direct-permission marketing with Yahoo!’s industry-leading sales and service organization [source].”

Yoyodyne launched in 1995 and was known for four branded programs, EZSpree.com (aggregator of online shopping sites), GetRichClick.com (an advertisement sponsoring website), EZVenture.com (a promotional company for small businesses) and EZWheels.com (a site that refers car buyers directly to car manufacturers).

“Yoyodyne provides several key elements Yahoo! seeks in extending its business, including the most talented team in the industry; a proven business model, client and user base; and a solid track record,” stated Tim Koogle, former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. “This acquisition further enhances Yahoo!’s leading position of providing marketers with the world’s best interactive platform for reaching highly targeted audiences, along with the richest online user experience based on their stated preferences.”

Through the acquisition, Yahoo! was able to bring Seth Godin, the charismatic founder of Yoyodyne on Yahoo!’s Board. Godin became the Vice-President of Permission Marketing for Yahoo! and Godin had also served as a columnist for Fast Company since now. Godin has written many books and started Squidoo, a “recommendation network” website last year.

7.) Sportasy
Sportasy was a foundation for fantasy sports league websites. Yahoo! acquired Sportasy on December 1998 for an undisclosed amount, but Yahoo! seems to have benefitted from the acquisition as the Yahoo! fantasy sport league websites are still widely used. I looked at the HTML source of the available pages on archive.org for Sportasy.com and discovered that before Yahoo! acquired the company, Sportasy charged $15 to participate in the fantasy sports leagues and the sports that the company supported was baseball, hockey, soccer, football, and basketball fantasy leagues. Sportasy services has been implemented into Yahoo! Sports.

8.) HYPERParallel, Inc.
San Francisco based HyperParallel Inc. was the second of Yahoo!’s marketing company acquisitions after Yoyodyne. HYPERParallel Inc. was acquired for $8 million in 1999. HYPERParallel developed software for Fortune 500 companies that mined data and provided analysis that focused and dubbed it “CRM (customer relationship management)” systems. The market sectors that HyperParallel served included the telecomm, retail, and banking sectors. According to TwoCrows, a product of HYPERParallel included the //Discovery suite which were “data mining tools for classification, regression, clustering, association, and sequencing.”

9.) Log-Me-On.com

Log-Me-On.com LLC was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. Log-Me-On.com was a website that served as a bookmark website and an e-mail address manager that could be accessed anywhere. Yahoo! most likely embedded Log-Me-On.com technology into the toolbar and possibly into Yahoo! Mail. Log-Me-On had a service called EmailAnywhere that allowed users to e-mail anyone from anywhere in the world and also had an Auto-Log-On feature that remembered your username and password. This acquisition most likely took place to develop technology in order to compete with the 1998 Hotmail acquisition by Microsoft. Here is the archived “Learn More” page of Log-Me-On available by Archive.org.

10.) GeoCities.com, Starseed Inc., and Futuretouch Corporation

Ah yes, GeoCities. I would call GeoCities the “My Space” of the 90s. GeoCities is still alive and running on Yahoo! and is a free homepage builder that costs up to $8.95 per month for premium services. Geocities was Yahoo’s first acquisition billion dollar plus acquisition.

GeoCities was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in 1994. Before GeoCities was acquired and revamped GeoCities, communities were heavily advocated. Users selected a “city” to group their webpages with a certain clique. These cities were related to the website content that the user was planning on focusing upon. For example, entertainment websites were “Hollywood” and computer-related websites were “SiliconValley.”

GeoCities started as BHI or “Beverly Hills Internet” at www.bhi90210.com and was a small web hosting company in southern California. GeoCities quickly popularized and was signing thousands of “Homesteaders” per day. On May 1997, GeoCities started the allowing of advetisements and many users revolted, but since the Internet was becoming a global commodity and because GeoCities was a free service, it still remained popular.

However in June 1998, GeoCities introduced watermark advertisements on every website hosted by GeoCities, which ultimately costed them many users (including myself). Watermarked advertisements when a floating image hovered on the right side of the page on every website and followed the page as you scrolled up and down. I found myself switching to TheGlobe.com to practice website design after GeoCities introduced the watermark ads.

In August 1998, GeoCities had an IPO with a listing on NASDAQ with the code, GCTY. The initial price was $17 and rose to even $100 at one point on the first day. Four months later, Yahoo! purchased GeoCities for $3.57 billion. There was another major drop in users after Yahoo! modified the terms of service on GeoCities stating that Yahoo! would own the property placed on GeoCities pages including media such as images, but Yahoo! had quickly reversed this TOS decision after more and more people revolted.

Before Yahoo! bought Geocities, Geocities bought Starseed Inc., who created Webring.org. Therefore, Webbring became Yahoo! property. Webring.org was a website in which a collective group of websites joined various web rings and usually placed their web ring group affiliation at the bottom of their website. Users could then navigate to previous, next, and random websites pertaining to that web ring from the webpage owned by a particular web ring group member. After Yahoo! purchased GeoCities, they then revamped Webring.org into Yahoo! Webring and then ended it. Starseed was founded by a high school student, Sage Weil.

Also through the GeoCities acquisition, Yahoo! gained possession of Futuretouch Corporation according to SEO By the Sea. Futuretouch created WebDazzle, which was the first online WYSIWYG web site designer created in Java for easy web site design. Futuretouch was founded by Scott Daniel.

Check out the list of the GeoCities Neighborhood communities on Wikipedia.

11.) Encompass
Encompass, Inc. had designed software that had complemented Internet connections for ISPs. I am guessing that it was somewhat similar to channel portals that are offered through AOL and Prodigy. “This acquisition supports Yahoo!’s strategy to deliver consumers the best experience available on the Web and expands the business services the company offers its strategic partners. Encompass currently serves the world’s leading PC and PC peripheral manufacturers and ISPs, including Acer, CTX, Dell, Diamond Multimedia, Hewlett-Packard, Micron, Toshiba, Sony, AT&T, Earthlink and GTE [source].” The acquisition was valued at $130 million

12.) Online Anywhere
In 1999, Yahoo! acquired Online Anywhere for $80 million. Online Anywhere was started as a Motorola Ventures project and enabled web publishers to deliver content to TVs and other wireless devices. Online Anywhere used FlashMap technology that automatically converted published content to fit the sizes of the devices where the content is being delivered. Online Anywhere was founded in 1997 by Mohan Vishwanath, Anurag Mendhekar, and Sridhar Ranganathan from Bombay (Mumbai), India.

13.) Broadcast.com

Broadcast.com was Yahoo!’s biggest acquisitions so far at an astonishing $5.7 billion in stock. Broadcast.com started out as a web radio company called AudioNet created by Chris Jaeb. Later on, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban came on board and added tremendous value to AudioNet. AudioNet was created to solve the problem of being able to listen to Indiana University basketball games over the Internet and eventually led to the ability to broadcast other sports events over the Internet. Later on, other legal events were added to the broadcasts such as the presidential convention happening at the time.

In May 1998, AudioNet renamed themselves to Broadcast.com and then in the following July, Broadcast.com had an IPO in which the stock price went up from $18/share and closed at $62.75/share on the first day. On April 1999, Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com and then began to transition the technology into the Yahoo! product line. The acquisition of Broadcast.com and LAUNCH Media led to the Yahoo! LAUNCHcast music player.

One of the owners of Broadcast.com, Mark Cuban used his wealth from the acquisition as a means for creating his own reality show similar to Donald Trump and NBC’s The Apprentice. Mark Cuban’s show was called The Contender. Cuban had also bought the NBA basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks. Wikipedia has a detailed page on Mark Cuban and Mark Cuban has own blog that he updates regularly.

Through the Broadcast acquisition, Yahoo! also gained possession of SimpleNet and NetRoadShow, Inc. as well.

14.) Innovative Systems Services Group, Inc. (ISSG) and MyQuest Systems [source - SEO By The Sea]
MyQuest Systems was known as a telecommunications application provider. Madhu Yarlagadda was the Founder and Chief Operating Office of both MyQuest Systems and Innovative Systems Services. After the acquisition, Madhu Yarlagadda was signed on as the Director of Engineering of Communications Products at Yahoo! Some of the patents filed by people related to ISSG and MyQuest include Message store architecture, Intelligent voice converter, Integrated instant messaging, and routing and telephone services billing system

15.) Arthas.com
Arthas.com was acquired by Yahoo! on March 23, 2000 and served as a P2P technology platform. Arthas.com was the operating arm of dotBank.com which was an electronic payment service similar to PayPal. The purpose of the acquisition was to drive Arthas users to Yahoo! and to integrate Arthas technology into Yahoo!’s commerce offerings.

Arthas allowed anyone with an e-mail address to send and receive money as well as send personalized electronic bills. “We couldn’t be happier to join the Yahoo! team,” stated Robert Simon, a co-founder of Arthas.com, in the press release. “By joining the Web’s leading enabler of commerce, we can deliver our easy-to-use, secure, cost-effective payment solutions to the world’s largest audience of online purchasers.”

16.) eGroups
eGroups.com was a management website for e-mail lists. This website allowed its users to create personalized email lists or sign-up as a member for other lists. Yahoo! bought this company for $432 million in August 2000 and the company was integrated into Yahoo! Groups.

eGroups.com was originally created by Scott Hassan in January 1997 and was originally an e-mail archiving service called FindMail. Carl Page, the brother of Google founder, Larry Page, worked part time with FindMail in May 1997. By January 2000, eGroups raised a few million from Sequoia Capital and merged with a company called OneList. eGroups.com then began working on going public but decided to sell themselves instead.

17.) Kimo

On November 9, 2000, Yahoo! had acquired the No. 1 ranked web site in Taiwan called Kimo (www.kimo.co.tw) for $145 million. Kimo provided users with search content with localized options as well as a free e-mail service, groups, and chat. Through this agreement, Yahoo! Taiwan was able to enhance features. Yahoo! was able to seize a larger marketshare in Asia as well. In the third quarter of 2000, Kimo reported that they had received 25 million page views per day and had four million registered members.

“By teaming up with one of the leading global Internet companies, Kimo is able to leverage Yahoo!’s global network and vast resources to enhance its presence and impact a larger audience locally as well as worldwide,” stated David Lu, the CEO of Kimo in the press release from 2000. “We are pleased to combine our strengths to meet the demands of the marketplace – delivering relevant content and services to consumers, as well as new tools and programs to advertisers and merchants.”

18.) Sold.com.au

On April 10, 2001, Yahoo! Australia & New Zealand completed the acquisition of SOLD.com.au for $30 million. This acquisition gave Yahoo! the upper hand of online transactions in the land down under. SOLD.com.au was one of the leading auction websites in Australia and New Zealand and had more than 180,000 users and 185 merchants.

After the acquisition took place, SOLD.com.au relocated to the Yahoo! Australia & NZ office in Sydney. Around the same time of the acquisition Yahoo!’s global networks enabled $1.4 billion of transactions through its commerce operations. As of today Sold.com.au redirects to eBay and the Sold.com.au technology has been implemented into Yahoo!’s global commerce system.

19.) LAUNCH Media Inc.

If you know what LAUNCH is, you may remember the packaged CDs that would come in the mail with the LAUNCH logo and had contained music and videos. Marrying the content from LAUNCH with Yahoo! Broadcast (see Broadcast.com acquisition above) enabled Yahoo! to synergize its various entertainment channels. When Yahoo! acquired LAUNCH Media for $12 million on June 28, 2001, Yahoo! had a regular of 192 million consumers accessing Yahoo!’s music services.

“Under the terms of the merger agreement, through a subsidiary, Yahoo! will commence a cash tender offer to acquire all of LAUNCH’s outstanding shares at a price of $0.92 per share in cash representing aggregate consideration of approximately $12 million. Any shares not purchased in the tender offer will be converted into the same cash price in a subsequent merger” stated the press release.

The founders of LAUNCH are David Goldberg and Bob Roback. “We believe this transaction is in the best interests of our stockholders,” stated David Goldberg in the press release. “The addition of LAUNCH’s enormous music video collection and Internet radio service to Yahoo!’s existing entertainment offerings will create even more compelling opportunities for online music fans, established and new artists, and advertisers.”

Around the same time of the acquisition, LAUNCH was settling a lawsuit with Universal Music Group. As many of you know, Universal Music Group is currently in talks with YouTube and MySpace for settling lawsuits as well. Some things just never change.

20.) HotJobs

HotJobs.com was an online search engine that was integrated into Yahoo! in 2002 and is now known as Yahoo! HotJobs. Yahoo!’s HotJobs is now a direct competitor to Monster.com as it also provides tools and software for anyone looking to hire employees or for people looking for jobs. According to Wikipedia, “Job seekers voted Yahoo! HotJobs the (2002, 2003) ‘Best General Purpose Job Board for Job Seekers,’ and recruiters voted Yahoo! HotJobs the (2003) ‘Most Recruiter-Friendly General Purpose Site’ in a survey conducted by WEDDLE’s.” Yahoo! acquired the New York based company for $436 million.

HotJobs was created by Richard Johnson and was based on 24 W. 40th Street on the 12th floor in New York City. Before creating HotJobs, Johnson created the RBL Agency which is similar to ManPower and provided technical job placements. Johnson spotted Gonna Basinger at a Jupiter Communications’ conference and hired her as the first sales person for HotJobs. During the summer of 1997, Johnson started expanding the HotJobs operation by hiring recruiters from the RBL Agecy to join the HotJobs sales team.

In 1999, HotJobs made their first major transaction, a $1.6 million commercial during Super Bowl XXXIII while its revenues were at $2.5 million at the time. Shortly after that, a large number of companies started piling HotJobs with requests including IBM. By the end of 1999, HotJobs went plublic and the company grew to $100 million in revenues.

From the CNET press release, it was noted that Yahoo! CEO, Terry Semel stated “Yahoo’s acquisition of HotJobs is consistent with our business strategy to build a diversified global business and provide deeper, more valuable solutions for our consumers and business partners.”

21.) Cadê

On January 9, 2002, FindArticles.com announced that Yahoo! Brasil successfully completed the acquisition of Cadê from StarMedia Network. This acquisition generated a larger market presence in Latin America. However, the acquisition details were not disclosed. After the acquisition, Cadê and Yahoo! Brasil was merged and had become the third largest portal website as well as being “nation’s largest Web search directory” of the Latin American Internet market.

“This acquisition demonstrates our commitment to constantly improve on the user experience and our determination to be a long-term player in the Brazilian market,” stated Robert Alonso, the VP and manager director for Yahoo! Latin America in the press release from 2002. “As we continue to build the Internet’s leading global consumer and business services company, Yahoo! remains focused on delivering relevant, comprehensive content, programs and services to consumers, advertisers and customers around the world.”

StarMedia is a media company that targets Portuguese and Spanish-speaking Internet users. The company has offices in all of the major Latin American countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Spain.

22.) AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb.com was a search engine that was created in 1999 as an inspiration from FTP Search, a doctorate thesis paper written by Tor Egges at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Wikipedia compares AlltheWeb to Google in terms of size and technology, but obviously never became as popular. However, AlltheWeb had slightly greater advantages over Google in the sense that they had more advanced features, search clustering, a customizable look and feel, and also a fresher database.

On February 25, 2003 Overture had agreed to pay for AlltheWeb for $70 million in cash and a performance-based cash payment of $30 million over three years. About 8 months later, Yahoo! acquired Overture and took AlltheWeb and AltaVista with it. The Overture acquisition is mentioned below.

23.) Inktomi

Inktomi was a company based out of California and was founded by UC Berkeley professor, Eric Brewer and graduate student, Paul Gauthier created in 1996. Inktomi was then implemented into the HotBot search engine. Inktomi become widely popularized for its use of distributed network technology which made search more efficient compared to rival, AltaVista who ran their searches on a single machine.

Inktomi then went on to develop Traffic Server which was a technology based on proxy cache. According to Cache Now!, proxy cache is when “users request pages from a local server instead of direct from the source. The local server gets the page, saves it on disk and forwards it to the user. Subsequent requests from other users of the cache get the saved copy, which is much faster and does not consume Internet bandwidth.”

Shortly after Traffic Server took off, Inktomi started purchasing various other companies. In November 1999, Inktomi bought Webspective, FastForward Networks in September 2000, and eScene Networks in June 2001. Before those acquisitions, Inktomi had also bought C2B and Impulse Buy Networks. Then the Internet bubble burst and Inktomi lost many of its customers and its value, so Yahoo! swallowed it up for $235 million.

“Bringing together a powerful combination of Yahoo!’s global audience and unmatched breadth and depth of services with Inktomi’s leading search technology, will allow us to create one of the most relevant, comprehensive and highest quality search offerings on the Web for both our affiliate partners and Yahoo!,” stated Yahoo! CEO, Terry Semel in the 2003 acquisition press release.

24.) Overture

Overture Services, Inc. is now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing after the $1.63 billion acquisition. Overture was a spinoff of Idealab and was originally known as Goto.com. Overture was the inventor of P4P (aka Pay For Performance). Overture was the inspiration for monetizing search results that is leading today’s web companies into billion dollar margins. Google billions in revenues are accounted for by monetization from web searches based on Overture’s original ideas. Before Yahoo! purchased Overture, Yahoo! estimated that $25 million of their revenues from Q3 of 2002 was responsible for by Overture.

“The combined assets position Yahoo! as the largest global player in the rapidly growing Internet advertising sector,” stated CEO of Yahoo!, Terry Semel in the press release. “Together, the two companies will be able to provide the most compelling and diversified suite of integrated marketing solutions around the globe, including branding, paid placement, graphical ads, text links, multimedia, and contextual advertising.”

Overture was founded in 1997 and was based in Pasadena, CA at the time of the acquisition. During the acquisition, Overture had 1,000 people employed worldwide.

25.) 3721 Internet Assistant
In January 2004, Yahoo! acquired Beijing 3721 Technology Co. Ltd.’s 3721 Internet Assistant which was a Browser Helper Object (BHO) website. A BHO is a .DLL file that works as a plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer to provide “enhanced functionality.” After being acquired Yahoo!, 3721 Internet Assistant was converted to Yahoo! Assistant. Microsoft AntiSpyware software however detected 3721 Internet Assistant as Spyware, which are programs that collects data about Internet users without the user’s consent.

“3721 Internet Assistant was originally released as a normal client-server application. However, it turned to use ActiveX technology to install itself on a client system later and was also shipped with many sharewares as default install options. 3721 Internet Assistant was also blamed for its use of a flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer to install itself automatically when a user is browsing an array of 3721 sponsored personal and commercial websites with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Yahoo! Assistant is also included in 3721 Chinese Keywords and Yahoo! Mail Express, but sometimes the whole package of Internet Assistant, Chinese Keywords and Mail Express is named ‘Yahoo! Assistant’ in some sharewares. The company says the automatic installation ended in September 2005 and now asks user’s permission before installing, however, CA Inc. reported that during Yahoo! Assistant installation, extra components are installed without obtaining user’s consent [source: Wikipedia].”

The acquisition price was not disclosed. In 2005, a court in Beijing allowed 3721 to hear an accusation that it had against Baidu.com, another Chinese search engine company created by Robin Li. VentureBeat and the commenters of the post have an interesting discussion of Chinese based search giants.

26.) Kelkoo

Kelkoo was a European price comparision website that was created in 1999 by Pierre Chappaz and Mauricio Lopez in France. Innovacom and Banexis Ventures provided initial funding of $3 million and then merged with Spanish website Dondecomprar.com and UK-based website ShopGenie. Then merged as one company, Kelkoo then acquired ZoomIt, a Scandinavian website. In June 2003, Kelkoo then partnered with the European subsidiary of MSN.

On March 24, 2004, Matt Hines, a staff writer for CNET News wrote about the acquisition. “The acquisition also strengthens Yahoo’s position against rival Google, which is testing its own comparison shopping service, known as Froogle.” Kelkoo had a search technology that was known as Shopping Popularity which Yahoo! had implemented into their own commerce services.

Kelkoo is still online today and is a shopping hub for countries all over Europe. Yahoo! had acquired the company for $579 million.

27.) Oddpost

One of the valuable add-ons for Yahoo! Mail was contributed through the acquisition of Oddpost. Oddpost was the first company to use JavaScipt to mimic desktop mail applications which led to the popularity of Ajax by other large companies. Since I am having a hard time explaining it in Lamen’s, I thought I would quote Wikipedia: “This design concept minimized the amount of data sent during an email session by creating a JavaScript UI engine on the client side and sending ‘Datapacks’ instead of reloading the whole interface on every click like a traditional webmail service (Hotmail, Yahoo!) [source].”

In an interview from 2003, Oddpost’s co-founder, Ethan Diamond described Yahoo! Mail’s setbacks:
“This data-centric approach may sound painfully obvious, but consider that at 1024×768 (the most common resolution on the web), only about 30% of Yahoo! Mail’s inbox screen is devoted to your mail. The remaining 70% is not, as you might expect, all devoted to advertising. In fact, ads only account for about 10% of the screen real estate, and the remaining 60% is consumed by navigation, dead space and administrative debris. [Wikipedia]”

The concept behind Oddpost lead to some of the functionality feature ideas in GMail as well. Yahoo! bought Oddpost on July 9, 2004 and opened the new Yahoo! Mail on September 14, 2005 for testing. Although the Oddpost servers were closed and now the website asks you to check out Yahoo! Mail, those who had Oddpost e-mail addresses could use them to log in to Yahoo! Mail Beta.

28.) The All-Seeing Eye

Acquiring the All-Seeing Eye was Yahoo!’s second move to penetrate the gaming market after ClassicGames.com. The All-Seeing Eye is known as ASE and is a game server browser that was designed by UDPSoft. The All-Seeing Eye was developed in two years and was released on June 15, 2001. GameSpy was the market leader at the time, but the All-Seeing Eye grew in popularity rapidly. Yahoo! bought the All-Seeing Eye in September 2004 for an undisclosed amount.

After buying the All-Seeing Eye, Yahoo! converged the service into the Yahoo! All-Seeing Eye. During the time of acquisition, the All-Seeing Eye had boasted over 12 million downloads. After Yahoo! had acquired the All-Seeing Eye, many of its users revolted against the service as the service had lacked noticeable updates.

The All-Seeing Eye’s competitors includes Qtracker, GameSpy Arcade, and XFire. XFire and Yahoo! had fought a legal battle, but resolved it in January 2006. Currently, the full version of the All-Seeing Eye costs $15. When I looked at the website last, there were 71,188 total players online mostly playing Half-Life.

29.) MusicMatch

On September 14, 2004, Yahoo! had officially acquired Musicmatch, Inc. for $160 million. Musicmatch was founded in 1997 and is especially known for its Musicmatch Jukebox software which competes with iTunes, WinAmp, and other mp3 software players. Musicmatch Radio network is a competitor of RealNetworks’ Rhapsody and other pay-per-month streaming music players.

Musicmatch Jukebox allows users to play audio files, burn, download, and organize music collections. The Musicmatch Radio network contains over 900,000 songs and 200 radio stations available for streaming during the acquisition. For those who want to purchase the music that they liked, Musicmatch, Inc. also had the Musicmatch Music Store which allowed users to download music and contained over 700,000 songs during the acquisition.

“Our goal is to give consumers the music they want, how they want it, anywhere they want it. We believe Musicmatch provides a great music experience that will further extend our offerings. The combination of our strengths will help us execute on our vision of providing music fans the best and broadest suite of music products and services, from discovery to distribution to music management,” stated David Goldberg, founder of LAUNCH Media (see above) and the VP and Generam Manager for Yahoo! Music in the 2004 press release. “This acquisition also gives Yahoo! a strong position in the digital music business, in both ad-supported media, such as radio and music videos, and on-demand distribution, with subscriptions and downloads.”

Musicmatch, Inc. is still online today and is a subsidiary of Yahoo! Music. Currently the Musicmatch Jukebox 10 is available for download on the company website and still has still provides the aforementioned services. The songs today cost roughly around 99 cents per song at the Musicmatch Music Store and now Musicmatch boasts over 1 million songs available for download.

30.) Stata Labs, Inc.

On October 21, 2004, CNET News.com wrote about Yahoo! buying an e-mail search company called Stata Labs, which was a private company based in San Mateo, CA. Stata Labs developed a software that allowed users to search for text and attachments within e-mails called Bloomba. CNet noted that this acquisition “could be an investment in a coming PC search tool to rival Google and Microsoft.”

The financial details of the acquisition was not disclosed. Around the same time of the acquisition, Google released software that also was able to search through e-mails for text and attachments. Also around that same time, Microsoft had also bought Lookout Software, a company that is now the basis of Windows Desktop Search. Stata Labs was bought quietly and there was not an official press release published.

Stata Labs boasted themselves as the world’s first search-based email client and also stated that their software had the ability to search all email and attachments even if you had 10,000 or more messages. Stata Labs also developed SAproxy, an anti-spam software “based on the leading Open Source spam identification technology, SpamAssassinâ„¢ [source].”

31.) VerdiSoft

In February 2005, Yahoo! had acquired VerdiSoft, a software company whose purpose was to converge mobile and broadband technologies and promote the interconnection of the two means of communication. Through the acquisition, Marco Boerries joined the Yahoo! Management Team as
the Senior Vice President of Connected Life.

Marco Boerries is also known for developing Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice. VentureBeat wrote a detailed article about the acquisition on July 26, 2005. VerdiSoft had never shipped any products, yet was still acquired by Yahoo! for a reported $93 million.

In the above linked VentureBeat article, Michael Bazeley, the author of the post explained how the technology works. “If you add a phone number into the phone book on your mobile phone, that number would automatically be added to your other address books. If you read an email message on the phone, it’s marked as read when you get back to your desk at the office.”

Yahoo! had hired the entire the VerdiSoft team, including the 35 who were based in Germany. In the Connected Life blog dated from January, Terry Semel introduced a new array of Yahoo! Go products utilized VerdiSoft technologies.

32.) Ludicorp Research (Owner of Flickr)

Ludicorp Research had created Flickr, a photo sharing website and Game Neverending, a multiplayer computer game that was cancelled in 2004. Yahoo!’s eyes were on Flickr, which was largely based on the community aspects of the photo sharing website. Flickr has grown exponentially since its launch and even overtook Shutterfly in terms of users.

Flickr has especially popularized amongst bloggers. The concept of tagging was one of Flickr’s major winning points. There is also a feature called Interestingness in which top pictures are added to the front of the Interestingness pool, which is a similar concept to featured videos on YouTube and stories making it to the frontpage of Digg. Yahoo! is currently attempting to patent the word, Interestingness.

In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp Research and on June 28, 2005, all the content from Flickr servers from Vancouver, British Columbia made its way to USA. As far as integration goes, Flickr results have found its way into Yahoo! Web Search. Yahoo! bought Ludicorp for $40 million.

33.) Stadeon

On March 4, 2005, Gamasutra wrote an article entitled Yahoo! Games Opens Yahoo Games Studio, Acquires Stadeon. This was Yahoo!’s third acquisition in the gaming industry after ClassicGames and All-Seeing Eye. However, this was the first deal that brought Yahoo! Games into the mobile games market. With the acquisition, Yahoo! broke Yahoo! Games into two separate divisions: Yahoo! Game Studio and another division that Stadeon Inc. would oversee. Yahoo! Games Studio would create games for mobile phones and Stadeon would provide cross-platform games technology.

“We are excited to bring Stadeon’s cross-platform games technology to Yahoo! Games,” stated John Cahil, the founder of Stadeon. “Yahoo! understands the value of its large community and now letting its consumers play against any one of the 345 million Yahoo! users worldwide, anywhere, anytime and whether they are on a mobile device or their PC.”

John Cahill had become the Director of Games Operations and Platforms for Yahoo! Games after the acquisition. Also through the acquisition, 345 million Yahoo! Games users would be able to play anyone, anywhere in the world while mobile.

34.) TeRespondo

On April 18, 2005, Nacho Hernandez of Search Engine Roundtable wrote about Yahoo! buying TeRespondo to gain market share in Latin America. Today TeRespondo.com relocates to Yahoo! Search Marketing. TeRespondo was a Brazilian PPC (pay-per-click) advertising network. Nacho included statistics on the Brazilian Internet market, which proves the amount of value that was added through the Yahoo!-TeRespondo transaction.

In essence, the 2004 population of the Hispanic population in North America, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean was about 567 million and there is about 68 million Internet users in that population. Two Colombian entrepreneurs, Daniel Echavarria and Juan Diego founded TeRespondo.

What is TeRespondo up to these days? TeRespondo released a new CPC model for Mexican markets for Yahoo!

35.) Dialpad

On June 14, 2005, Yahoo! had acquired Dialpad for an undisclosed amount. Brad Garlinghouse, the former CEO of Dialpad Communications and also the member of the Yahoo! Management Team that wrote a memo stating that it was time for Yahoo! to see some changes as mentioned at the very top of this post. Three months later, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in stock. These transactions by both companies was a sign to the world that VoIP was a booming market.

Dialpad found its way on to Yahoo! Messenger shortly after the acquisition. Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger all have VoIP technologies implemented within their messaging services as of today. When I was backtracking for news on this acquisition, I stumbled upon GigaOM, who seems to have been the first to report the acquisition.

“What we saw in DialPad was quick way to add PC2Phone and inbound calls,” stated Joanna Stevens, Yahoo’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, reported in the GigaOM article.

36.) Blo.gs

In June 2005, Jeremy Zawodny, a Yahoo! employee in the platform engineering group wrote in his blog that the acquisition of blo.gs will be treated similarly to the Flickr acquistion. “What are our plans for the service? Simple. Keep it running, make it scale, and make it even better (a lot like the Flickr plans),” stated Zawodny. According to Wikipedia, Zawodny is also credited as being the inventor of podcasting.

blo.gs is a simple blog pinging website and is currently tracking over 162 million blogs. Blo.gs is based on RSS feed aggregation for blogs and lists the newly updated blogs on the Blo.gs homepage. Blo.gs also lists the most popular posts as well.

Jim Winstead, the founder of blo.gs also wrote about the acquisition [here].

37.) Konfabulator

In July 2005, Yahoo! had acquired Konfabulator.com and integrated the technology into the Yahoo! Widget Engine. Yahoo! Widgets provide free run time engines for Windows and Mac OS X. Yahoo! Widgets run small applications within the website and call these small software applications widget engines. A large number of blogs and millions of MySpace users have widgets integrated within their profiles. Also, as more people are customizing their Internet homepages and desktops to display only customized news and other information pertaining to what the user is interested, widgets popularized even more.

Widget creators combine JavaScript and XML to import and display information. Some of the widgets included in the Yahoo! Widget Engine are stock ticker widgets, weather widgets, and a digital clock widget. The weather widget could import reports from Weather.com and AccuWeather.com.

The core team of developers of Konfabulator includes Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke, and Ed Voas. This team released Konfabulator originally on February 10, 2003 and sold the service as a Mac-only application for $24.95 and then after a new release, Konfabulator was available for Windows at a price of $19.95.

38.) 46% Ownership of AliBaba.com

In October 2005, Yahoo! purchased a 46% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion in cash and gave Alibaba control of Yahoo! China. Ma Yun (Jack Ma), the founder of Alibaba.com remained on board for Alibaba/Yahoo! China. Alibaba.com’s slogan is “Global Trade starts here…” In a Supply-Chain Management Procurement class that I took in Fall 2005 at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State, I was a part of a group in which we write a fictitious proposition to strategically source a semiconductor company in Indonesia (the countries were picked from a hat). In the report, I remember I wrote about Alibaba.com as it flattens the distance between buyers and suppliers in the Asian market particularly in the manufacturing sector.

Yahoo! China/Alibaba.com had taken Zhou Hongyi, the chairman of Qihoo to court, alleging that Zhou may have embezzled and/or defrauded Yahoo! China before leaving Yahoo! China the year before. Once again, I must redirect you to the VentureBeat article that focuses on the Alibaba/Qihoo ordeal.

39.) Upcoming.org

In October 2005, Yahoo! had acquired Upcoming.org at an undisclosed amount. Finding out the purpose of Upcoming.org is described right in the company name. Upcoming.org lists upcoming events that are submitted by Upcoming users. Users can add new events, explore events, add friends and view their friends’ event listings, and even submit pictures to their event page. Upcoming.org also utilizes tagging features for the events.

Since Yahoo! acquired Upcoming, users could log in to the website using their Yahoo IDs. Also after the acquisition, the three founders of Upcoming.org moved to Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for work. Some of the latest features implemented into Upcoming.org includes mobile access and Guestlists.

40.) Whereonearth

Consumers tend to make offline purchases within 8-10 miles of their homes and Whereonearth believes that in the age of the Internet, advertisements should be a lot more personalized. To answer this problem, Yahoo! acquired local search and advertising company, Whereonearth. Through the acquisition, Yahoo! hoped “Together, we’ll be able to provide the most geo-relevant information across all of Yahoo!’s products and services [source].”

Whereonearth was created in 1995 and has 3 members on Board: Paul Frew of Elderstreet Capital Partners as the Chairman, Devesh (Dev) Patel as the CEO, and Qamar Aziz as the Non-Executive Director. Whereonearth also has four products: Internet Locality, Where@Risk, GeoPlanet, and L-Sphere. Whereonearth was acquired by Yahoo! in October 2005 at an undisclosed amount.

41.) Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us was acquired at an undisclosed amount on December 9, 2005, but it is rumored that the site was acquired for $30-$35 million. Del.icio.us was created by Joshua Schachter and during the time of the acquisition, Del.icio.us had approximately 300,000 users according to TechCrunch. From the TechCrunch post, I found the Yahoo! Search Blog post where Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Search wrote about his interview with Dave Taylor.

“What’s so cool about del.icio.us?” Taylor asked Jeremy Zawodny. Zawodny replied, “Del.icio.us is a service for saving and sharing bookmarks. It’s popular in the blog world because a lot of bloggers are information hounds that collect hundreds of links to interesting web sites. Del.icio.us makes it easy to put them all in once place. Bloggers also like to publish links for their friends and readers to see, so there are a lot of tools for making that easy too.”

Earlier this month, Del.icio.us announced that they are hiring for PHP, JavaScript, Database, UI, and C++ developers and as on September 25, 2006, Del.icio.us attained it’s 1 millionth user. Some of the other known social bookmarking websites include Digg, Reddit, and the new Facebook Share feature.

42.) JumpCut

On September 27, 2006, former TechCrunch blogger, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about Yahoo! acquiring Jumpcut. This acquisition was a bit overshadowed by Google’s acquisition of YouTube. However, Jumpcut provides a different type of service compared to other video streaming websites. Jumpcut promoted the remixing of videos by providing an online Ajax-style interface where users can upload a video and control transitions at every second of the video such as dissolve and wipe.

Another element of Jumpcut is community. In the About Jumpcut page, the website states “as soon as you sign in to Jumpcut, you’ll instantly be part of an online creative community. This means you can look through all of the media that other people have made public and grab anything to use in your own movie. If you choose, you can share any of your stuff with the community as well. If you missed the shot of The Big Moment, chances are, someone else got it, so the more people that join the community and share their stuff, the better it gets for everyone.”

JumpCut was created 6 months before the acquisition even took place. The founders of JumpCut are Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham. Jumpcut.com was created under the company, MiraVida Media, Inc. The acquisition details are not known, but Kirkpatrick believeed that it was significantly less than the $65 million that Sony paid for Groupr. The acquisition rumor floating around is $15 million.

43.) AdInterax

On October 17, 2006, Yahoo! announced that it had acquired AdInterax, which is the last advertising company that Yahoo! purchased as of today. The financial details were not released. According to the press release, AdInterax “will enable Yahoo! to provide advanced rich media creative assembly and campaign management tools directly to marketers at no charge as part of Yahoo!’s graphical advertising offerings.”

AdInterax was created in 1999 as a C-Corporation with its headquarters in New York. AdInterax specializes in the creation of rich media advertisements. Acquiring AdInterax is preparing Yahoo! to provide their advertisement clients with this rich media.

“Creativity in advertising is critical to the further adoption of the Internet as a marketing medium, and Yahoo! is committed to giving marketers more creative choice and control over their ads,” stated Greg Coleman, an executive VP of global media sales at Yahoo!. “We look forward to working with our customers and AdInterax’s publisher partners to generate new and innovative solutions for marketers that help simplify the rich media creation and purchasing process.”

44.) Bix.com

And finally, the last official acquisition by Yahoo! as of today is Bix.com, a contest website. This company was acquired by Yahoo! 13 days ago at an undisclosed amount. Not only is Bix.com a contest website, but it is also a karaoke (which means “empty orchestra” in Japanese) website. The CEO of Bix, Miek Speiser would be migrating to Yahoo! as the VP of Community for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos according to TechCrunch.

Bix was not the only company that Speiser had successfully sold off. Speiser also created and then sold epinions.com to Shopping.com in 2003 for $30 million. Bix is based out of Palo Alto and has 16 people working for the company. Speiser wrote a message to Bix users to anticipate some big things coming their way:
“With Bix’s platform focused on talent-based competitions combined with Yahoo!’s global audience and leadership in social media, as well as its sales and marketing muscle, we will take Bix to the next level. Expect many more contests with cool prizes, more community features, tons of entertaining content, and integration with many of your favorite Yahoo! services.”

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TAKKLE, Inc. which is a social network for high schoolers has announced that today the company has received Series A funding from several venture capitalists.  Some of the investors include Greycroft Partners LLC, WMG Investments, IJ Smith Enterprises LLC, and Jack Schneider, who is a Manager Director at Allen & Company Inc.

“Given our sports-crazed national culture and the explosive growth in social networking, we built TAKKLE to enable amateur athletes and fans to connect via their passion for sports,” stated David Birnbaum, the CEO and founder of TAKKLE Inc.  “With this financing from strategic partners, we are now poised to build on our early success and grow TAKKLE to its full potential.”

TAKKLE is the first and only social network that focuses on high school sports thus far and hopefully the last.  I say this only because I played sports in high school and this is not the type of social network that I see myself belonging to, but I am always willing to try new things.  However, I do give TAKKLE credit for being original and providing modern technology for a market that has never been chased after.  TAKKLE will allow users to upload photos, videos, statistics, and create player and team profiles.  Not even ESPN offers such a service for high schoolers and that could be a winning point for TAKKLE.

Wasserman Media Group, one of TAKKLE’s investors stated that the investment firm would do what they can to support TAKKLE.  Wasserman has direct experience in the sports management industry and is planning on providing brand visibility for TAKKLE.  “We are initially targeting the high school market but will soon grow the TAKKLE network to encompass all amateur athletics – intramural, club, office league, youth, and fantasy – and create uniquely targeted marketing opportunities for our partners and sponsors,” Birnbaum added.

If you are a user of TAKKLE, make sure to root for the Ann Arbor Huron River Rats sports teams in their profiles (if they have one).  That’s right, the former high school of myself and fellow Pulse 2.0 bloggers, Mo Kakwan and Shan Sadiq, was built on a landfill next to the property of the University of Michigan, thus we are the River Rats and proud of it.

Where Are You Now (WAYN.com), which is the world’s largest travel and lifestyle social network announced that they had raised $11 million in Series A venture funding from several different investors including Espirit Capital Partners.  Some of the investors in WAYN.com includes Brent Hoberman, a co-founder of lastminute.com and Constant Tedder, a co-founder and managing director of Jagex (owner of RuneScape, an Internet multi-player game).   

In addition to the $11 million in funding, Brent Hoberman will be joining WAYN as a Chairman of the Board in January 2007.  Hoberman had lastminute.com taken public in 2000 and was sold to Travelocity for $1.07 billion.  This new funding will allow WAYN to expand a team to Poland.  The funding will also help WAYN hire a trip planner as well.  IT infrastructure enhancements are also expected.

When registering, depending on your username, WAYN almost forces you to import your contact list from that e-mail provider (the skip this step is written in fine print below).  I had imported my GMail contacts.  The registration steps are a bit lengthy.  WAYN features a profile picture, a list of trips for you to add, and to build a personal profile which includes eye and hair color, build, height, occupation, education, religion, and ethnic origin.  WAYN also has you fill out your favorite films, music, songs, bands, hobbies, and interests.

WAYN has 7 million members as of today and used to have 45,000 users in March 2005.  The number of members are growing at 35,000 per day.  WAYN was co-founded by Peter Ward and he stated that “Back in 2002 we recognized the huge potential for a travel community network. Travel captures the imagination and meeting people from different places is something that most of us really enjoy doing.  We’re so excited to be working with some of the most respected leaders in their fields. Each investor brings something different and their input in the next phase of our growth will be invaluable.”  WAYN was also founded by Jerome Touze and Mike Lines.  Espirit Capital Partners has $500 million within their buying power.

 

There have been a few instances in which Microsoft used its buying and development power to bring the company to a market in which it has not been before.  Many people have criticized the Zune as not being replaceable to the iPod and believes it will flop.  My instinct was to believe that the Zune is one of the best products released by Microsoft.  The more I looked on blogs and on Digg, the more I found negative press about the Zune until I ran into a BusinessWeek article that seems to have shared my belief about the direction that the Zune is taking Microsoft.

Before I continue about the Zune, I’d like to remind you about the 1998 acquisition that Microsoft made of Sabeer Bhatia’s Hotmail.com and what it did for Microsoft.  Some people list Hotmail as being part of the top 10 worst Internet acquisitions to take place, but HipMojo placed this acquisition as one of the top 10 Internet acquisitions to take place.

HipMojo states, “$400M is a lot of money to pay for any company, let alone a free email service firm, especially when Yahoo! had acquired Four11 for $92 million previously.  But, Yahoo! was an Internet company, Microsoft was a software company who thanks to their visionary founder missed out on the Web’s first hoorah.  So it viewed acquiring Hotmail for $400M as it cost of admission for its late entry online.” 

Microsoft clearly has the buying power to penetrate markets that differ highly from their core competency.  This is what the Zune is doing for Microsoft.  It is bringing Microsoft into a market that Apple has been dominating for the last couple of years.  In 2005 alone, Apple sold more than 30 million iPods.  The Zune is just chiselling away at the iPod’s market in which they have held a monopoly for the past couple years.

BusinessWeek had reported that at 3:32PM on Oct. 19, Microsoft’s J Allard sent an e-mail to the 230 Microsoft employees working on the Zune with a link to a video on YouTube of Steve Jobs from 1996 stating: “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.  They have absolutely no taste and what that means is- and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.  In the sense that… In the sense, they… they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”

“I for one…want to see this guy eat his words,” Allard stated in response to the video. “Those are fighting words. He is speaking to every one of us and saying that we don’t get it.”  On November 14, the Zune was officially placed on the shelves and its development began 8 months prior.

Another market penetration strategy posed by Microsoft includes the Xbox.  The Zune is expected to a follow a similar path.  A minor setback of criticism followed by new releases that may begin to dominate the market.

Yesterday, Wikipedia announced that they have hit 1.5 million articles generated by users providing the open source articles in the English language. “Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia [source].“ The current total article count is roughly 5 million.

Wikipedia started as a complementary website for Nupedia, an online encyclopedia founded on March 9, 2000 by Bomis Inc., a company in which the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, were a part of. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject “Let’s make a wiki”, he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It’s an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia’s use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE “open” and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They’re also a potentially great source for content. So there’s little downside, as far as I can determine.

Wikipedia runs itself on in-house created software called MediaWiki which is an open source system coded in PHP and MySQL. The funding for Wikipedia is through the Wikimedia Foundation and 4th quarter 2005 costs for Wikipedia was $321,000 comprised mostly from the cost of hardware.

Recently China had removed a ban on Wikipedia, but has started providing full access to the site again. China had banned Wikipedia for about a year.

Earlier Pulse 2.0 wrote an article about Larry Sanger preparing to launch a Wikipedia rival called Citizendium.

On November 8, I wrote about how the first line of TV shows would be introduced for download on the Xbox 360â„¢. Today this feature is launching exactly one year after the Xbox 360â„¢ was released. Xbox 360â„¢ is the first gaming console to offer such a service. Not a bad way to celebrate the holidays for Microsoft.

The list of TV channels offering shows for download through the XBox Live Marketplace include CBS, UFC, Adult Swim, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, MTV2, Nick Toons, Nickelodeon, VH1, Warner Bros., and Paramount.

According to the latest Microsoft press release, “Since its launch on Nov. 22, 2005, Xbox 360 has gained impressive traction fast. Xbox 360 was the fastest console to reach 5 million sold, and 6 million Xbox 360 consoles had been sold by the end of September 2006. At least 10 million are expected to be sold by holiday.” This new feature joins a plethora of other accessories now available for the Xbox 360â„¢ such as the XBox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel and the XBox 360 HD DVD Player.

“We’re exactly where we wanted to be this holiday with Xbox 360 retail stock availability,” stated Jeff Bell, a corporation VP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. “With an incredible library of games, more than 4 million gamers playing online with Xbox Live, and a growing catalog of high-definition gaming and entertainment content, why would anyone wait in line when you can get a superior experience from Xbox 360 right now?”

Parental settings can be customized through the Xbox 360â„¢ and explicit content can be blocked as well. Downloading is based on the number of points purchased and a broadband connection is required.

Windows Live has launched a mobile SMS search. Users simply send a SMS to 95483 (WLIVE) to get instant results from anywhere. You can search for businesses, dictionary definitions, residential listings, get stock quotes, and get instant answers to questions through the service.

The service is currently only available to subscribers of Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and Alltel in the United States.

Here is a full list of things you can do with the service from the Windows Live Mobile blog

• Local Business & Residential Listing ( e.g. Starbucks and your zip code)

• Reverse Phone Number Lookup (‘4258828080’)

• Instant Answer Queries (Remember to start your queries with ‘?’unless specified otherwise)

• Stock Quotes (U.S. & Int’l Exchanges)

• Area & Country Telephone Codes

• Word Definitions – use ‘D’ instead of ‘?’

• Holiday Dates

• Math (Calculations, Unit Conversions & Equation Solutions- ‘? 15% of 32.99’ or ‘? Cups in liter’ or ‘? 2y^2+5y+10=40’

• Health & General Information (e.g. ‘? Calories in Martini’ OR ‘? Tokyo Population’)

• Auto Spell-check and Correction

• Improved Formatting of Result Messages

David Poltrack, CBS’s chief research officer, said that he does not want CBS content off YouTube at the Future of Television Forum which was held at NYU’s Stern School of Business. According to Poltrack, YouTubee has not affected CBSs programming.

“When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers,” he said.

He also said “If they’re going to steal it, give it to them anyway.”

This comes at a time most content producers and rights owners are trying to fight illegal video sharing. Its actually quite refreshing to see Poltrack’s view on YouTube and video sharing. Hopefully other networks will embrace CBS’s stance on video sharing.

I guess this means we can enjoy more of David Caruso’s famous one-liners from CSI-Miami on YouTube:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948[/youtube]
[Post Source - Advertising Age]

According to the Google Blog, Google added three new features to its online webpage creator. The new features are an image editor, multiple site support, and mobile support.

The image editing feature lets you edit pictures for you web page online. You can crop, rotate, add special effects, sharpen, increase / decrease colors, and edit brightness through the new image editing interface.

You can also create up to five sites with different URLs under your account now. This is great because many users do not want to reveal their Gmail address in their homepage address which was a problem in the past.

The third feature addition to Google Page Creator is automatic mobile optimization of sites. All Google Page Creator sites will automatically be optimized for cell phones now.

When page creator first came out, it had its share of problems. But Google is doing a great job listening to its users. These new updates will definitely add to Page Creator’s popularity.