A MarketPlace of Ideas                        

Ebay bought www.Craigslist.org  (fractional)

                  www.Gumtree.com 

                  http://www.stubhub.com

Google bought www.YouTube.com

Yahoo bought www.bix.com   ( I do not see why! this one will go out of style rapido ! )  

— original arty at  http://mashable.com/2006/11/16/yahoo-buys-bixcom/

Yahoo has just bought Bix.com, according to an email that came in tonight. In a deal to be announced by the company on Friday, Yahoo will acquire the site, which was founded in January and launched in August. The Palo Alto-based company, formerly known as 900 seconds, has 16 employees and took funding of $6.77 million from Trinity Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. The price hasn’t been disclosed, and the plan is to keep Bix independent, while also pursuing integration with some of Yahoo’s other properties - I imagine something similar to the way relevant questions from Yahoo Answers are posted across Yahoo sites, although the Bix integration may follow a different path.

Bix is a bit like YouTube for contests, and is in a similar market to SingShot or Fox’s karaoke site KSolo, but I wouldn’t say it’s directly competitive. In addition to entering competitions, you can add comments and post the clips to MySpace, hi5 and the rest - based on the massive amount of activity on the site, it seems that the community has grown fast. Bix has also been a fairly ugly site for most of its existence, but now they seem to have tidied things up substantially, and made the site much easier to use. At the time of writing, the contest on the homepage is a “faceoff” between two classic TV series - that’s a similar idea to European startup BattleOut, and I think both will appeal to a wide audience (although BattleOut is badly located, being over in Germany). Bix.com has a business model, too - like SingShot, Jumpcut (another Yahoo acquisition that has some similar ideas) and Eyespot, they’ve been running sponsored contests to promote certain brands. Mashable covered one such event in October, when famous rapper “The Game” launched two contests through Bix.com to find a dancer for his video and a rapper for his next mix tape.

Why would Yahoo buy? They don’t have a great deal going on in the YouTube arena, and they did try launching Yahoo Talent Show in October, a contest staged through Yahoo Video - clearly, they think this is a hot space. It was probably cheap, too ($10 million?), and it makes sense to snap up these properties early, before the price tags balloon to YouTube-esque levels. Personally, I think both Bix.com and SingShot have massive mainstream appeal, although the latter was a bit late in dropping its insistence on paid accounts, which probably slowed their growth.

Yahoo bought  www.MyBlogLog.com  for a guestimated 10 Million Dollars

Aquisition Reasoning: Original arty at:  http://martinjwells.wordpress.com/2006/11/18/mybloglog-sold-for-10m/

<---- Yahoo have announced that they will be aquiring MyBlogLog for a (rumoured) $10m. Wow! Meteoric or what? The YouTube deal fed the big dreams, MyBlogLog is feeding the small ones. It was founded in March, but only really got moving in October when TechCrunch profiled them. Since then they’ve exploded in growth. An incredibly simple idea that in hindsight (always is) was obvious. Let people reading your blog expose themselves to others, then leverage that into a social network. They played on one of the core motivations of blogging: self-promotion.

So is it worth $10m? At first I thought it was crazy, but when you think about it this was one of those land grab deals. Another service will really struggle to overrun MyBlogLog because it already has most of the big blogs and is gaining serious traction. For Yahoo to come out with its own product (2-3 coders could write MyBlogLog in a couple of months) would have been technical possible, but they would not have gained traction against an existing service, let alone the Yahoo brand probably working against them.

Yahoo buying MyBlogLog has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with betting on a winner — if they keep going the way they are now, the product could well unify the entire blogosphere. The value then would be 2x-20x what they are now. Yahoo are making a smart bet and showing they have their ear to the ground.

Congratulations to Scott, Eric and Todd — your hourly rate for this project was $1543.209. (3 people averaging 60 hours per week for 9 months) —->

Description of MyBlogLog: Original Arty at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/10/mybloglog-adds-myspace-support/

<----

As 2006 closes in, my favorite web service of the year is MyBlogLog. Despite Yahoo! acquisition rumors a few weeks ago, the company is still privately-held. If I were in the web M&A business, they’d top my list along with music social networking service Last.fm.

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks:

1. MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile.
2. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web.
3. How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website.

The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website).

A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team? —->

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 9:19 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.