Now that Tony Perkins says the Valley’s VC community is spending again, and Fred Wilson is back in the game in NY with Union Square, the recast of the old Flatiron Partners, lots of small-ish companies are working hard to sharpen up their products, their revenue, and their customer list to look good for sale.
It’s a fun game to imagine–who would Google buy? And then, who would Microsoft buy?
Anyone who wants to play this game–no resemblance to actual reality required–post your thoughts here.
I’ll start off with a couple of points:
A) Google will go into the personalized text ad business in a big way. In my opinion, this is why they wanted Friendster–think about the value of millions of personal pages and networks when married to the kind of personalized search technologies and data-mining they are developing with the recently spun out and acquired Kaltix. What kind of CPM can you get for ads personalized to a user and their friends?
Given that Friendster passed, does that put eMode in line for acquisition next? That carefully grown company has just launched Tickle, their very own Friendster-killer, and they have a thriving quiz business with what, 4 million members?
B) Okay, now it’s time to talk about Microsoft. They just launched MyWallop.com, which few bloggers have seen, and they want to be in the blog space in a big way. They also want to be in the search space in an even bigger way, having proposed swallowing Google.
Given that Google passed (for now) on MSFT (is there a pattern here?), who else might they buy? Would the much smaller Friendster or web-services-oriented Technorati? fit the bill? Or it is just easier to reverse-engineer searching on RSS feeds and blog HTML and mining that data.
P.S. I just googled who would Google buy and got:
Should Google buy the ODP?
Why would Google buy Friendster?
Would Google buy Moreover
What else would Microsoft buy?
Would Google buy Daypop?
And other well-considered speculations.
Now that Tony Perkins says the Valley’s VC community is spending again, and Fred Wilson is back in the game in NY with Union Square, the recast of the old Flatiron Partners, lots of small-ish companies are working hard to sharpen up their products, their revenue, and their customer list to look good for sale.
It’s a fun game to imagine–who would Google buy? And then, who would Microsoft buy?
Anyone who wants to play this game–no resemblance to actual reality required–post your thoughts here.
I’ll start off with a couple of points:
A) Google will go into the personalized text ad business in a big way. In my opinion, this is why they wanted Friendster–think about the value of millions of personal pages and networks when married to the kind of personalized search technologies and data-mining they are developing with the recently spun out and acquired Kaltix. What kind of CPM can you get for ads personalized to a user and their friends?
Given that Friendster passed, does that put eMode in line for acquisition next? That carefully grown company has just launched Tickle, their very own Friendster-killer, and they have a thriving quiz business with what, 4 million members?
B) Okay, now it’s time to talk about Microsoft. They just launched MyWallop.com, which few bloggers have seen, and they want to be in the blog space in a big way. They also want to be in the search space in an even bigger way, having proposed swallowing Google.
Given that Google passed (for now) on MSFT (is there a pattern here?), who else might they buy? Would the much smaller Friendster or web-services-oriented Technorati? fit the bill? Or it is just easier to reverse-engineer searching on RSS feeds and blog HTML and mining that data.
P.S. I just googled who would Google buy and got:
Should Google buy the ODP?
Why would Google buy Friendster?
Would Google buy Moreover
What else would Microsoft buy?
Would Google buy Daypop?
And other well-considered speculations.