Google buys Measure Map, Jeff Veen leaves Adaptive Path to work at Google.
Google buys Measure Map, Jeff Veen leaves Adaptive Path to work at Google.
It's a done deal...Disney is buying Pixar. This bums me out in a lot of different ways. The big winner? Apple Computer.
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.
Dave Winer comments on the weblogs.com/Verisign deal...odd omission of a link to my post even though he references it several times. Bad luck that I caught him traveling; if I'd realized that beforehand, I would have held off. Dave seems to trust Verisign to do the job; I think Verisign has shown itself to be an untrustworthy, terrible company.
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.