kottke.org home archives + xml about kottke.org contact me
kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products

kottke.org posts about 'acquisitions'

Google buys Measure Map, Jeff Veen leaves Adaptive Path to work at Google.

Yahoo! buys del.icio.us...muxway is all growed up. There's an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo! is hiring/buying the "alpha geeks" (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn't (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company's development.

Michael Bierut offers a requiem for the AT&T logo by Saul Bass. SBC is buying AT&T, keeping the name, but introducing a new logo.

Verisign confirms their purchase of weblogs.com from Dave Winer.

Weblogs.com sold to Verisign

Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign (~$5 million is the figure being bandied about for $2.3 million). This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I've heard it from multiple sources, who knows?

Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it's not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against...the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.

Update: Silicon Beat says they have confirmation that Verisign bought weblogs.com:

We're getting confirmation that the rumors about Verisign buying Dave Winer's Weblogs.com are true. The price is $2 million. What Verisign wants with Weblogs is another matter. Weblogs was one of the first, if not the first, centralized ping servers that blogs could use to alert the world to new content.

I like how when a weblog has two independent sources on something, it's a "rumor"...

Update #2: Verisign confirms the purchase.

Weblogs, Inc. bought by AOL? If so, this is a perfect match.

Andy Baio sells Upcoming.org to Yahoo! Congrats! I can't wait to see what he, Leonard, and Gordon do with the site on a full-time basis. And Yahoo! keeps swallowing my friends...

Moreover to be purchased by "much larger multi-national company". I worked at Moreover as a web designer for 10 months back in 2000-1.

Metacritic, my first stop when looking for movie reviews, has been purchased by CNET. Press release here. (Odd stat in press release: 170K uniques a month...seems low.)

Makers of the PulpFiction newsreader for OS X sold to illumineX. Congrats to Erik and the team...sounds like a much needed rest.

More about this page

kottke.org is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998. You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or an interesting link for me, send them along. Here's the kottke.org RSS feed kottke.org RSS feed.

Tags related to 'acquisitions':

business   dotcom   rss   stupidcompanies   davewiner   yahoo   google   weblogsdotcom

Advertisement

dot dot dot

Advertise on kottke.org via The Deck.

Looking for work? Tags, tags, tags!

Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or bestof.

Recently popular tags (last 3 weeks)

indianajones   walle   christopherhitchens   movies   parenting   video   photography   art   flying   time   design   space   nyc   china   pixar

All-time popular tags

movies   photography   books   nyc   science   food   lists   design   business   sports   video   weblogs   music   bestof   art

Some of my favorite tags

photography   economics   lists   bestof   infoviz   food   nyc   firstworldproblems   cities   restaurants   video   timelapse   interviews   language   maps   fashion   nsfw   remix  

Random tags

sunshine   prison   cities   barcade   marypoppins   lifeafterpeople   realestate   cars   fundraising   hosseinderakhshan   fridakahlo   sony   pentagram   movies   im

kottke.org

You're visiting kottke.org. All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Good luck will come to those who dig around in the archives. If you've reached this point by accident, I suggest panic.