Joe Kraus–the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold his most recent start-up, JotSpot, to Google in 2006 and has been a director of product management since–has moved to its Google Ventures unit as a partner, said several sources.
Sources added that Kraus is likely to be the first of several well-known appointments at the relatively new venture arm of the search giant.
Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.
Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.
Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.
But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.
In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.
Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.
GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.”
As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.
Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.
But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
Of the amazingly Internet-experience-free board that billionaire investor Carl Icahn has proposed to replace Yahoo’s current directors in this proxy fight, there is one name who does have a lot of Web-related experience, especially with regards to Yahoo.
Specifically, in how to make bank from Yahoo’s desperation.
That would be entrepreneur and all-around bon vivant Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in the heady days of 1999 for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock.
In BoomTown’s ongoing meet-the-VCs-and-cringe series, here’s a chat I recently had with Highland Capital Partners’ Bob Davis.
I have known Davis for a long time from his previous life as Co-Founder and CEO of Lycos, the then-third-placed portal and one of the shooting stars from Web 1.0.
And I would have to say he cracked me up [...]
This BoomTown column was first published in The Wall Street Journal on November 19, 2001. All rights reserved.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year, Sony Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nobuyuki Idei pondered the future of the world’s largest consumer-electronics company caught in the maelstrom of the heady Internet age.
What technology or [...]
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.
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