VeriSign acquires Weblogs.com

Michael Graves of VeriSign announced the acquisition of Weblogs.com this evening. SiliconBeat reports Dave Winer sold the service for $2 million. VeriSign plans to maintain the ping beacon in its current form with additional revenue models and ping extensions beyond the current implementation.

VeriSign hints at upsell opportunities for ping submission and retrieval and views the weblogs.com ping beacon as a “competing service.” They plan to overhaul the Weblogs.com infrastructure to achieve higher levels of performance and stability. VeriSign also mentions a future statistics service available at Weblogs.com that will display statistics such as total pings received, processed feeds, and language information.

I expect VeriSign will introduce an authentication certificate for ping submissions to its servers. One possible upsell on the listening side is the ability to be alerted to a blog update before anyone else, similar to how stock market systems delay stock quotes to non-premium customers. VeriSign could also sell more personal authentication keys to bloggers using stand-alone services such as Movable Type or WordPress to allow for the rebroadcast of a ping submission.

Movable Type users who no longer wish to send a ping to weblogs.com can replace weblogs.com in all of their installed blogs by customizing Movable Type default ping options for the WeblogsPingURL directive.

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Mickey Hart on file sharing

Mickey Hart, former drummer for the Grateful Dead, is on stage at Web 2.0 right now and making a whole lot of sense. Jeff Mallet from SNOCAP, a digital licensing and copyright management company is also part of the discussion panel to represent the paid model. Some choice quotes from Mickey:

“[The fans] didn’t steal it, we gave it away”

“If we ever make a good album, they’ll buy that.”

“I’ve probably been recorded more than anyone else.”

“We played in the park and we always played better when we played free. I think it’s a good thing to share and give people something. Whets their appetite too…if they go to the trouble to bring a machine and tape it, they should have it.”

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Quotes from Terry Semel of Yahoo!

John Battelle interviewed Terry Semel this morning at Web 2.0. Below are some select quotes I found particularly interesting.

If you look at Google as being more than search, “as a portal [Google] would probably be rated #4.”

“So far [Google] seems to have no real plan, but maybe they do.”

“We think the big change on the Internet is not just to get more and more unique users. As we go forward it’s more about a deeper experience, more time spent, and a deeper experience for users and advertisers.”

Almost every session is mentioning Google even though there are no Google representatives on stage. Google is mentioned in terms of its mission statement, it’s “don’t be evil” mantra, its backend infrastructure, as well as its latest products.

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Technorati clustered search

Technorati has combined keyword search and Blog Finder to enable clustered search across various blog-level topic areas.

Searching for the information you care about can be a bit elusive. A gardener looking for the last information about a bush will be overwhelmed with information about George W. Restrict your search to gardening and you have some interesting results. You have a similar problem with the search term “Java.” Would you like information about coffee, the Indonesian island, or the programming language?

You can combine advanced keyword search with advanced tag search for some even more interesting results. You can search for Java OR Mocha in blog tags coffee OR beans for example.

It’s really interesting stuff and we’re just getting started.

Weblogs Inc. sold to America OnLine

Jason Calacanis just announced the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by America OnLine. Weblogs Inc. is a blog network of 90 weblogs employing over 130 bloggers in the consumer, technology, wireless, video games, media & entertainment, business, life sciences, and events. Weblogs Inc. received venture capital funding from Mark Cuban.

I have heard terms of the deal are cash and stock with about a $25 million base and $15 million worth of incentives. If true, Weblogs Inc. received a similar valuation to Flickr. Update: Wired News reports the deal was $25 million in cash with no mention of incentives.

Some questions remain unanswered. What is the future of the bloggers in your network? Who will determine future blog direction across Weblogs Inc. properties? Will Blogsmith continue to be a product offering?

America OnLine and Yahoo! have both let the world know they plan to aggregate and produce content on a variety of topics. While Yahoo!’s plan is still in formation, AOL just acquired a good head-start in unique content through the acquisition.

How stable is the Weblogs Inc. network of sites? Media brands such as The New York Times and NBC have value in the brand as well as individual stars, but we have seen movements of key personalities away as we have already seen with Peter Rojas’ move from Gawker’s Gizmodo to Weblogs Inc.’s Engadget site. Can these personalities break out on their own and deflate the value of the Weblogs Inc. network? Can AOL bolster the brand across their Time Warner properties so no one would notice the difference?

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eBay and Skype terms and details

I talked to Steve Jurvetson today about the sale of Skype to eBay, the terms of the deal, and what the team at Skype looked for when considering potential acquirers. It sounds like Skype had a pretty good deal and were able to name their terms.

Skype was approached by a variety of potential acquirers but was not too interested in selling at first. Skype was able to keep some form of autonomy by through its own board of directors, an annual budget from eBay, and a two-way incentive plan that provides financial and ownership incentives if Skype meets certain goals and Skype is able to take a little back if eBay does not deliver on its end with budget and marketing.

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Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator

Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons

I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator‘s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future.

I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury Software in May. We discussed the recently shipped NewsGator Enterprise Edition, what it’s like to maintain code bases in 4 languages, and how properties such as NetNewsWire and FeedDemon integrate with the NewsGator vision.

Download the full interview in MP3 format here. The 14.7 MB file is 32 minutes and 11 seconds in length.

Interview Questions

  1. Brent, what were the growing pains of Ranchero? What options did you consider moving forward? (00:27)
  2. Brent, how were you first introduced to the idea of joining NewsGator? (02:25)
  3. Greg, why is the Mac important to your product roadmap? (03:13)
  4. Any plans for a Linux client? (04:21)
  5. How does MarsEdit or TopStyle fit into your product strategy? (05:08)
  6. What do you gain by acquiring these companies instead of just doing a partnership? What do you gain by bringing them in-house? (06:02)
  7. What’s it like having engineers in Tennessee and Washington and headquarters in Denver? (06:56)
  8. You currently maintain code in C#, ASP.net, Delphi, and Objective C. Any concern about maintaining such a large codebase? What are the plans to backup or augment Brent and Nick’s development efforts? (08:59)
  9. How big is your support team? (11:30)
  10. Will Shiela become an employee of NewsGator? What will be her role? (13:20)
  11. What is possible with NewsGator synchronization? What should developers be paying attention to and how can developers tap into the NewsGator user base? (13:59)
  12. Tell me about post-level ratings. Any plans to integrate post-level ratings? (17:24)
  13. NewsGator for Outlook, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire each offer a list of suggested feeds. Any plans to combine such a feature into one list? (17:44)
  14. Are any of those feed listings paid inclusion right now? (18:55)
  15. How has the company grown and changed in the past year? A year ago did you see this all playing out as it did? (19:18)
  16. Now that you have given away two years of client products, what are the revenue opportunities over the next two years for those products? (20:52)
  17. What’s next? Tell me about your private label product and other things you have planned for the next six months. (22:19)
  18. What do you need to be able to run NewsGator Enterprise Server? (23:48)
  19. Brent, what are you working on with NetNewsWire? What are your top feature requests? (25:55)
  20. I hear you are hiring. What are you looking for, and are there geographical constraints? (26:52)
  21. What do you see as emerging trends in blogging or aggregation? (29:30)

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Web 2.0 launchpad

I am attending the Web 2.0 conference today and decided to crash the Launchpad session to see what’s new with a variety of companies. The Launchpad provides 6 minutes for a company to introduce and demonstrate a new product to the audience in a manner very similar to the DEMO conference.

Socialtext just announced at Web 2.0 a move into completely open source by Q1 2006. Socialtext is currently only 20% open source.

Rollyo is an interface to Yahoo! Search allowing users to restrict the scope of their search to specific sites. Dave Pell described it as “Yahoo! provides the engine, we provide the steering wheel.” Rollyo users can select up to 25 sites to restrict their search, and share their saved scoped search publicly and placed into categories and identified by tags.

Joyent is a web-based groupware suite covering mail, calendar, contacts, and file sharing. The site uses tags to classify content, Ajax to browse, and RSS to subscribe to changing content. The company’s web server was unavailable for me during their demonstration, making me wonder about the company’s scalability.

Bunchball is a social application focused on helping people connect for activities. Bunchball provides social architecture to developers. Users join the site, create a profile, and join groups. Developers provide the content and hosted applications and Bunchball collects a portion of the revenue from each developer.

Zimbra is an open groupware company that integrates across calendars, contacts, mail, and arbitrary web services to provide contextual information in your mail reader. The software is available as a hosted service as well as a download. Is a date mentioned in an e-mail? Mouse-over the date and Zimbra will show you what else you have scheduled that day. Would you like to see more information about a person mentioned in an e-mail? Hover over his name, and see contact information, including direct contact information such as Skype.

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Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org

Yahoo! just announced they have acquired events site Upcoming.org and the three-man team of Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, and Leonard Lin. Upcoming is an events message board for individuals and companies, providing a way to publicize and discover events. Upcoming has a database of venues supplied by users, tags for events, as well as information about what events its members are attending and watching. Upcoming recently added a groups feature to allow private events and recurring distribution lists.

Upcoming and its team will be integrated with Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local has a database of venues complete with reviews and merchant supplied data. Yahoo! Groups is a launchpad for interest groups and could benefit from better integration with event and venue information provided by the new Yahoo! Local. I expect Yahoo! 360 will add a list of events a member is watching or attending to its user information offerings within the next few months.

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NewsGator appIcon for OS X

I just created a new application icon for OS X using the NewsGator logo. Here’s how you swap logos for NetNewsWire:

  1. Find the NetNewsWire application on your hard drive. It is most likely in your Applications folder.
  2. Right-click, and select “Show Package Contents.”
  3. Open the “Contents” folder.
  4. Open the “Resources” folder.
  5. Replace the existing appIcon.icns with the new NewsGator icon (you may want to back up your existing copy).
  6. Launch NetNewsWire.

Yes, it could be more pretty with transparencies, so feel free to modify if you like the idea.