This week, BoomTown has found an interesting chart to peruse about the loyalty people have for their smart-phone apps.
The takeaway for developers: Try to stay in Quadrant I!
In other words, Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars territory–it’s where they love you, they really love you.
There’s no question that Spotify is the latest hot start-up of the moment, which would be super annoying to BoomTown–who is easily irked by never-ending froth around Web 2.0 companies–if co-founder Daniel Ek were not so sharp and the digital-music-on-demand service he created not so nifty.
But, indeed, Ek turned out to be a very refreshing and level-headed serial entrepreneur in an interview I had with him yesterday in London.
Here’s the video.
The board of iLike planned a meeting earlier tonight to go over a buyout offer by MySpace, several sources close to the situation said. But it was suddenly canceled because of some thorny tax implications related to the talent-retention part of the deal to purchase the social music start-up.
This does not mean the pending acquisition is in jeopardy, sources said, and it could be on track to be signed as early as today, barring any more complications.
What’s also been unclear is the actual price the social networking giant is paying for iLike, which has been reported as about $20 million. In fact, only $13.5 million will be paid in cash, with $6 million slated for forward payments to retain key talent.
It’s certainly acquisition fever in Silicon Valley today. After it was announced that Facebook had bought FriendFeed, now comes the news that VMware has purchased SpringSource, a privately held enterprise and Web application development and management cloud computing start-up.
The price? That would be $420 million in cash and stock.
With the purchase of Spring Source, Palo Alto-based VMware–which is a top player in the virtualization space–is adding to its cloud-computing application-management strength and also its ties to the open-source community.
Yahoo confirmed the news–first reported by BoomTown and in The Wall Street Journal last night–that it was buying Xoopit, the San Francisco social email company.
And it did so in both a blog post and on Twitter, as you can see here:
@karaswisher @jvascellaro Your scoops confirmed http://bit.ly/gpOT2.
Well, thanks! But we are already onto new scoops, so try to keep up!
The price for the acquisition, which Yahoo did not reveal, was about $20 million, according to sources.
Yahoo plans on announcing Thursday that it has bought Xoopit for a price in the $20 million range, according to several sources, one of its first acquisitions in a long while.
Reached late this afternoon by BoomTown, a Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment about the purchase. Xoopit did not respond to emails earlier today.
But sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, videos, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them.
Xoopit’s investors–Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, along with several angel investors–have pumped about $6.5 million into the company since 2006.
All the news is already out about the new Yahoo homepage, which was launched today for users in the U.S. It features customizable apps, as well as a cleaner look.
But, just in case you are not satisfied yet, here is the full press release on the new front page for Yahoo.
Although it’s not news that Yahoo was readying a new version of its homepage and has spent a lot of time doing so–in fact, it’s gone all Handy Manny with a whole lot of test renovations–the Internet giant begins the massive rollout of it tomorrow.
The official launch of what was code-named “Metro,” which Yahoo had previously said was coming in the fall, will take place on an opt-in “beta” basis for the hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. and will be extended to France, the U.K. and India later this week.
The change is an important one for Yahoo, since its front page–one of the most trafficked on the Web–is perhaps its most powerful calling card to users and advertisers, as well as to Wall Street.
Here are the details and also an interview about it all with Yahoo SVP Tapan Bhat, as well as screenshots of the new page.
Almost two years ago, just as Web 2.0 was heating up, BoomTown did a video interview with Slide founder and CEO Max Levchin.
Soon after, the popular maker of widgets and other social networking applications grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors, which put the value of the company at $550 million.
But that was before the recession hit, as well as a generally more sober outlook for a lot of high-flying Silicon Valley darlings like Slide, which have had to wise up a little and get down to business.
So, it was time for another chat with Levchin to find out what’s what.
Late last night, Yahoo’s Tapan Bhat posted an update on the ongoing redesign of the Internet giant’s homepage, a massive undertaking given that 300 million people visit it each month.
Bhat, who is SVP of Yahoo’s Front Doors, Communities and Network Services, said the company was completing the first phase of its “bucket testing” and collecting feedback, but that, “Bottom line is we’re getting closer to the final design, but we’re not quite there yet.”
Indeed not, according to several sources at Yahoo, who said that the massive underhaul of the homepage has been a much more complex, much dicier effort and was taking a lot longer than expected to launch.
And, more importantly, new CEO Carol Bartz is also giving it the once-over.
Facebook, which has been very busy ferreting away to get a presence on all the big cellphone makers, is in talks with mobile handset giant Nokia about integrating the hot social-networking site on its phones.
Its deals like this–as well as building its popular Facebook app for smartphones like the BlackBerry from Research in Motion and the iPhone from Apple–that are spurring huge market share growth in the arena by Facebook.
And there are more deals to come, with cellphone makers like Palm and Motorola, as the smartphone market keeps heating up.
Too bad for fast-growing Facebook and others that there’s no money to be made yet.
Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.
Widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.
The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million and–before the current econalypse–had previously reported a $400 million valuation.
In a video with BoomTown, the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the new funding would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, add offices and staff and make acquisitions.
You almost have to admire the shape-shifting–if not a wee bit slippery–stylings of Slide CEO Max Levchin.
The serial entrepreneur and widget king has signed distribution deals with media giants, such as Time Warner’s Warner Bros. unit, CBS and Comcast’s E! Entertainment channel, to allow users of its FunSpace video service to look at clips from shows.
To make money, Slide will get a cut of ads sold by its media partners.
Oh my, how incredibly traditional of Levchin.
But it should probably come as no surprise that Levchin is now singing a bit of a different tune these days, as the daunting task of actually building a sustainable business model and attracting long-term advertisers has dawned on him and probably many other Web 2.0 wunderkinds.
Yahoo will begin testing out versions of its new main homepage to a minuscule number of users starting tomorrow, employing a design that more significantly allows users to customize the starting page in a way that essentially amounts to a kind of My Yahoo-lite for everyone.
Making such a shift will also be a big perceptual deal for Yahoo, which needs to prove it has remained current and open, especially compared to faster-growing rivals like Facebook.
Thus, making a success of its new design is critical, and Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang has been touting the idea that Yahoo must be the “starting point” to the Web for users.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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