In a slightly unexpected move, Web2Corp (NASDAQ: WBTO) has acquired ByIndia.com, a new website that boasts a YouTube-flavored design for video search, a similar MySpace interface for social networking, and an eBay-style auction page. However, ByIndia appears to be tailored for Indians as the primary demographic. Web2Corp took interest in ByIndia because they believe that it is to India as what Baidu.com is to China. Web2Corp also believes that this website has more potential than Guruji.com.

“We believe we are in early with a great product. India is a massive market that is gaining economic footing and ByIndia.com is the best product available for this audience. We plan to improve upon it. We see a Baidu-like opportunity to create the definitive community for this vast population,” stated William Mobley, Chairman and CEO of Web2 Corp. On the homepage for Web2 Corp, ByIndia is the featured product and when speaking of ByIndia, the page states “India is projected to eclipse China as the most populous country on the planet. Its economy is projected to be the third largest with the US and China in the next 15 years. We aim to dominate the growing market today.”

ByIndia.com isn’t Web2 Corp’s only major product. Here’s a list of other companies that Web2Corp companies:

• YouGetIt - http://www.yougetit.com/
• MyPrayerClub - http://www.myprayerclub.com/
• International Chamber of E-Commerce - http://www.chamberecommerce.com/
• Web1000Traffic.com - http://www.Web1000Traffic.com
• Live-Websupport.com - http://www.live-websupport.com
• Cheap Coders - http://www.cheapcoders.com
• Web 1000 - http://www.web1000.com
• Job Match Pro - http://www.jobmatchpro.com
• Hot Homepages - http://www.hothomepages.com
• My Crib Spot - http://www.mycribspot.com
• My Digital Spot - http://www.mydigitalspot.com
• Comm Bid - http://www.commbid.com
• Ad Agency Pro - http://www.adagencypro.com
• Family Homepages - http://www.familyhomepages.com
• eWeb Team - http://www.ewebteam.com
• Million New Jobs - http://www.millionnewjobs.com
• Mired Latina - http://www.miredlatina.com
• Template Superstore - http://www.templatesuperstore.com
• My College Mates - http://www.mycollegemates.com
• Free Stuff Make Money - http://www.freestuffmakemoney.com
• Website Owner - http://www.websiteowner.com
• Website Superstore - http://www.websitesuperstore.com

It is when you hear about acquisitions like these that you begin to explore the purchasing company a bit more. When I turned to the Web2Corp blog, there is a post that talks about Web2 Corp’s take on the Google-YouTube acquisition. “This week we find Google spending $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, the aggregator of ‘Jackass’ style juvenile video clips submitted by users that step all over copyright laws. While there is talk of Google becoming the equivalent of a television network over the Internet, Web2 sees Broadcast.com-Yahoo and AOL-Time Warner all over again. What say you?”

Although I do not know the dollar amount of the purchase for ByIndia, but the concept of ByIndia is similar to YouTube. If this was Web2 Corp’s actual viewpoint on the Google-YouTube acquisition, they would have had 2nd thoughts on the ByIndia acquisition.

Google has been on fire lately since with its announcement of the YouTube acquisition, but now it has gone wiki. This news comes when Google purchased JotSpot on October 31, 2006. JotSpot was created by Joe Kraus in 2004, who had also created Excite with his other JotSpot co-founder, Graham Spencer. The idea of JotSpot was conceived when Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus started a nonprofit business together and were sending each other a barrage of emails and ideas. Thus they began using a wiki and found out how organized they could be. This is when they decided that the rest of the world should be able to benefit from the ease of wiki use.

As JotSpot is being intergrated into Google software architecture, new users have been temporarily disallowed from signing up for JotSpot, but there is a waiting list. The acquisition details have not been mentioned.

For those of us who have not heard of JotSpot before the acquisition announcement such as myself, here is a screenshot of the homepage via archive.org before they took it down:

Users were able to create pages, send an email to every page, search/sort/share ideas, and use pre-built applications.

On October 31, TechCrunch reported that Condé Nast, the owners of Wired Magazine, had acquired Reddit.com. The price was not disclosed but Michael Arrington revealed that the owners of Reddit will be moving from their Boston location to San Francisco. Reddit has four employees.

TechCrunch reported “Reddit is a social news site that has always played second fiddle to Digg.” After reading this, I noticed an article posted in ValleyWag about how the Reddit founders must have felt when compared to Digg. The following quote from the founders of Reddit was placed on ValleyWag: “As far as I know, this was the first time we graced the pages of TechCrunch, so we’re just happy for the coverage. In fact, I think Michael made some very good points about reddit’s fast load time and high content-to-ad ratio. I do wish he’d mentioned our mascot, but oh well.”

It seems that ValleyWag wanted to get a response from the Reddit founders about not wanting to be compared to Digg. I think this is a good question from ValleyWag because sometimes when you see one of the first press releases of your acquisition, you should expect that the details of it should be focused more on the actual acquisition and not other potential acquisitions. Yes, we know everyone loves Digg, but there is definetely a time and place to highlight Digg’s success.

However the interview TechCrunch put together just two hours after the acquisition is impressive. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the founders of Reddit were interviewed by Michael Arrington and Marshall Kirkpatrick on TalkCrunch. I sat myself down and listened to it for 24 minutes. Here is a rundown of several of the interview points:

• Steve is 22 years old and will be 23 as of next week, Alexis is 23
• Steve was a fan of Paul Graham for a long time and attended a lecture by Paul Graham at Harvard about “How to Start a Start-Up.” Steve and Alexis had coffee with him and applied for Y-Combinator in their senior year of college. And then they moved to Boston with Y-Combinator funding.
• Reddit’s initial funding was $12,000. At the end of summer of 2005, Reddit had another round of funding which was less than $100,000.
• Reddit receives roughly 70,000 unique visitors per day and roughly around 700,000-800,000 pageviews per day. Recently they had an all-time high of 96,000.
• Arrington: “Well I’m proud to see that is the top story right now on Reddit beating out even your own blog entry announcing the acquisition. Is that still right?”
  Reddit founder: “Well we weren’t allowed to write our blog post until you had a fair shot at it.” Arrington followed that up with “And it looks like your story is #12 now.”
• The founders of Reddit stated that they would be maintaining creative control of Reddit as it was part of the discussion with Wired.
• Reddit owners were not allowed to mention anything about the acquisition, but stated that “they were very pleased.”
• One thing that was important to Reddit was not to “get in the way of the users.” This is what really drove the company direction.
• Steve will be moving to San Fran at the end of the week, Alexis will be moving in a couple months. Chris, another founder is under contract to finish his PhD in January.
• Arrington and the Reddit founders spoke to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg on IM around the same time as the acquisition and Rose definetely had warm wishes for Reddit.

Between ValleyWag, TechCrunch, and GigaOM, there is certainly a good amount of coverage on the Reddit acquisition. Congratulations to Steve on getting health insurance too.

Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet business group has announced today that they are acquiring Xiaonei.com, a Chinese leading college social network website. Xiaonei is the Chinese word for “on campus.” The plan is to merge Xiaonei’s users and interface with OPI’s social network, 5Q. Xiaonei will be added to a family of other OSI websites, Mop.com (entertainment portal), DoNews.com (news website), UUMe.com (Chinese clone of YouTube), and RenRen.com (classifieds).

Xiaonei is a Chinese version of Facebook as you can tell by the below screenshot:

Even though the acquisition details were not listed, the OPI CEO Joseph Chen stated that as far as competition, “There are still 20 smaller players out there [source].” “It wasn’t a cheap deal,” stated James Liu, the co-Chief Operating Officer of OPI. “We paid a premium, but the team deserves it.”

Xiaonei was created by Tsinghua University graduate, Wang Xing about one year ago. Liu stated that Xiaonei was pursuing various venture capitalists before OSI made a bid that Xiaonei couldn’t refuse. Xiaonei was backed by angel investors, money from Wang’s family, and by an ex-CTO of Amazon.com

In regards to its Facebook interface replication, Red Herring reports, “Xiaonei has come under fire from some Chinese users for its uncanny resemblance, both in form and function, to the popular Facebook.com. But that’s not something Mr. Liu’s losing sleep over—not when Xiaonei can deliver close to a million active users in one of China’s most sought after demographic groups [source].”

In a similar approach that Mark Zuckerberg used in the initial phase of Facebook in the U.S., Wang also made the social network exclusive to major univerisites in China such as Tsinghau University, Peking University in Beijing, and Fudan University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai. Xiaonei quickly grew to over 1 million users.

I believe that it is rather unfortunate that Xiaonei, a complete Facebook replica was sold. This may encourage others to steal design interfaces from other popular websites and attempt to sell them abroad.

Today Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) has acquired Serious Magic Inc.â„¢. Serious Magic Inc. is a developer of video editing software such as Ovationâ„¢, Visual Communicator, DV Rack, and ULTRAâ„¢ 2 . Serious Magic is also the creator of Vlog It!â„¢ Vlog It!â„¢ enables users to create video messages and easily and them to blogs.

Adobe® plans on streamlining Serious Magic products into the Adobe line of video software family which includes Adobe® Premiere. “The huge momentum behind Flash® Video, which is powering everything from online TV shows to YouTube and MySpace, is turbo-charging Adobe’s video business,” stated John Loiacono, the Senior VP of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. “The purchase of Serious Magic accelerates our vision to make, not just video but all dynamic media, an even more ubiquitous communications vehicle, whether you’re delivering content for the broadcast market, over the web or on mobile devices [source].”

Serious Magic™ is a privately held company based in Folsom, CA and Adobe Systems Inc. is a San Jose, CA based company. Adobe® had acquired Macromedia in December 2005. MSN Soapbox and Google Video also utilize Macromedia Flash® technology.

Viacom Inc. (NYSE:VIA) has announced that their subsidiary company, MTV Networks has acquired Quizilla. Quizilla is a company that was formed in 2002 where users can create quizzes. Quizilla is a top 5 online portal for female teenagers and in September 2006 alone, Quizilla was visited by 3.1 million unique hits.

“The website was acquired from Gorilla Nation Media, LLC, on behalf of the Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group [source].” Viacom’s plan with Quizilla is to integrate the service onto The-N.com’s ‘The Click’ videos.

Quizilla has joined a plethora of web applications that are family-oriented surrounding Viacom’s Nickelodeon. Other websites include Shockwave.com and AddictingGames.com which were acquired in August. In September, ParentsConnect.com was launched in Beta mode. One of the most recent features of Nickelodeon online is Turbo Nick 2.0, a video portal tailored for children. Kids these days… Back when I was a kid, I had to walk to school through 20 feet of snow going up-hill both ways.

“The acquisition of Quizilla combined with The-N.com and NeoPets will further deepen our already strong connection with our audience and provide them with new ways to experience our content on The N as well as the ability to create and share their own creative ideas and passions through Quizilla,” stated Cyma Zarghami, the President of Nickelodeon Television. “This is a great complement to our portfolio of brands that super serve preschoolers, kids, teens, parents and families overall.”

This news from Viacom comes shortly after Viacom mentioned that Facebook is too expensive for them right now, but they wanted MySpace for $500 million when Murdoch bought it. The Viacom-Quizilla acquisition details are not disclosed.

[Here] is the acquisition press release on the Viacom website.

Google just reported that the deal to buyout YouTube for $1.65 billion just went through and YouTube is now property of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Check Google’s [Press Center] for more details.