Cleveland? Give me a break! He's got to be the worst Family Guy character, other than maybe Chris Griffin.
I have to agree, a spinoff set around Quagmire or the guy in the wheelchair would be much better. Or, what about the old pervert from the Griffins' neighbourhood?
Actually, Name Development Ltd. was rumoured to be highly profitable pre-buyout by Marchex several years ago. (Interestingly, Name Development was a pioneer in "direct navigation and monetization" with its infamous Ultimate Search-branded parking pages with the yellow and blue layout and cute little googly-eyed computer monitor creature as a logo on all parked domains' placeholder pages.) They were rumoured to be doing something like $20 million in annual revenues with $17 million in net income, with less than a dozen paid staffers. Everyone's draws dropped at those numbers.
Correction again. From the press release, it states they've acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., and (presumably) have 100% ownership (in exchange for a combination of cash-and-stock). They're acquiring the source code to LiveJournal, and all its infrastructure components.
I use Blogger because of its permalink and post editing abilities, but I am considering either a switch to MSN Spaces or (possibly, and I stress this word heavily) back to LiveJournal -- if it can make major changes.
I disagree. Yahoo! could've bought Napster (the company formerly known as Roxio) for roughly the same price, based on the latest ROXI market capitalization and stock quote figures. Plus, they already have a co-branded Yahoo!/Napster distribution deal. The reason they didn't? Napster is bleeding red ink. Musicmatch, if I'm not mistaken, has been profitable for over a year (perhaps more). Though, I'm not sure *how* profitable as they're privately held.
Wow, my first time as the 2nd post to a thread. Okay, that was stupid. (Let's hope it doesn't ruin my excellent karma; just leave it at a score of 1 or something.)
The compose message function in My Way sucks ass, actually. If you bold something, it makes the rest of the text after it bold on the receiver's end. The whole system they use for composing messages is flawed. It's hard to describe, though.
And My Way survives by the Google advertisements. Its owner, Interactive Search Holdings, was recently acquired by Ask Jeeves. ISH also owns Excite and iWon, and in fact, I predict that Ask Jeeves will model Excite and iWon after My Way by removing all pop-up ads network wide.
The pain and numbness in your hand are definitely symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive stress injury. I'm 20 and I suffer the same thing.
Fortunately, there are solutions to relieve the symptoms.
First, I use a wrist brace/splint from Futuro. You can buy one from drugstore.com, though I got mine from the pharmacy or health/wellness department of Zellers. They range in price from $16 to $25, depending on where you buy it from and what country you live in. Definitely well worth it, though.
As well, try and get outside more. I admit I'm not the best at this, but I do take the dog for regular walks every day and try and do other outdoor chores.
You could also try lifting some five pound dumb bells and doing regular exercises for your wrists that way.
Ask Jeeves distributes paid advertising (both in search results and contextually targeted ads on content pages) from the Google AdWords program. Ask Jeeves takes 80 cents per click on a text ad from the AdWords program, with Google taking a 20 cent cut.
My bet is on Ask Jeeves. They're profitable and have sustained positive cash flow. Lycos makes sense for Jeeves.
If not Jeeves, I'll bet either InfoSpace or Primedia subsidiary About, Inc.
Cheers, Doug
Re:Where aren't they now...
on
For Sale: Lycos.com
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Verity, Inc. bought the enterprise Web search assets of Inktomi and Infoseek and is commonly used as the enterprise search appliance of choice at many large corporations. It renamed the product Verity Ultraseek.
Excite is now owned by Interactive Search Holdings, along with iWon and My Way. ISH is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ask Jeeves, which Jeeves paid $343 million for in March.
Cheers, Doug
Re:Largest domain selling amount?
on
For Sale: Lycos.com
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No. Terra Networks wants to sell its entire Lycos, Inc. subsidiary for approximately $200 million -- not just the domain name.
Lycos, Inc. includes: Angelfire, HTML Gear, Lycos Mail, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Webmonkey/Hotwired, and Wired News. It also has partnerships to create several co-branded Web sites. So, there are very valuable assets here.
My prediction: Ask Jeeves is likely thinking very heavily about acquiring Lycos to expand its distribution further. (It recently acquired Interactive Search Holdings for $343 million in cash and stock. ISH assets include Excite, iWon, My Search, and My Way, to name a few.) The more distribution Ask Jeeves has, the more money it can demand from Google -- which accounts for 70% of Ask Jeeves revenue. It currently takes 80 cents on the dollar, with Google taking 20 cents. With the purchase of ISH, Jeeves can probably demand 85. With Lycos too, it could quite easily get 90 cents. So, financially and strategically, Lycos would make sense for Jeeves.
Other possible candidates who might be interested in Lycos include InfoSpace, Primedia subsidiary About, Inc., or possibly even Google itself.
Lycos won't die -- it'll just change hands and be restructured. I guarantee it.
ICANN has made numerous unpopular decisions throughout its corporate life. So has VeriSign. This is truly a battle of two evils. Which one is the lesser evil, in your opinion?
In my own personal view, I do hope ICANN emerges from this lawsuit as the "victor". If VeriSign were to win its request for an injunction against ICANN, and on the broader claim that ICANN "unlawfully transformed itself from a technical coordination body to the de-facto Internet regulator," I feel it would have far-reaching implications for all of us. It would effectively muzzle ICANN and give VeriSign free reign to do as it pleases with the Internet -- at least until a legislative change was made, such as making ICANN into a government regulatory agency similar to the FCC. Mind you, that might be a good thing. It might force the Bush administration's conservative laissez-faire approach to Internet governance to get a dramatic overhaul and become more regulatory. Another plus to ICANN becoming a taxpayer-funded government regulatory body, it could keep its acronym and be enshrined into law as the Internet Commission for Assigned Names and Numbers. Or, it could become the Internet Naming and Numbering Agency -- or INNA.
Nonetheless, this will be a bitter battle.
It also has high stakes for VeriSign. If VeriSign is unsuccessful, it will almost certainly ensure that the dot-net gTLD is redelegated to a new operator later this year.
My take, Doug
P.S. Copies of the complaint: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/verisi gn.complaint.p1of2.022604.pdf
This ruling may actually have its merits. It is the first appellate court decision of its kind to rule on the legitimacy of squatters, or less than stellar companies, piggy-backing on trademarked terms as search keywords in sponsored results. It will set precedent, by whatever happens at trial in the district court.
Further, it's also good because it is yet-another-blow to "seedy" companies like Claria and WhenU, which install so-called "adware" on users' computers and then produce pop-up ads when the user visits a Web site of the competitor of the very sleezy advertiser.
I'm all for reduced patents and trademark giveaways, but something like this, is a good ruling.
The district court got it wrong.
However, Playboy may have to refile its suit since, at the time, Excite was still owned by the now defunct/dissolved Excite@Home. It was since purchased by Focus Interactive and InfoSpace. And since then, Focus Interactive bought out InfoSpace's remaining stake and now wholly owns Excite.
So their suit may have to target Focus Interactive now.:)
No, MetaCrawler is still a meta-search engine and does have paid listings, as well.
It, along with meta-search engines Dogpile, Go2Net, and WebCrawler, are owned by the slimmed down InfoSpace.
They all feature algorithmic results from AltaVista (owned by Yahoo! subsidiary Overture Services its sale by dot-com flameout and once popular incubation group CMGi), AlltheWeb (another Yahoo! web property), Google, Inktomi, and WiseNut (LookSmart's algorithmic search engine). As you can see, Yahoo! is swimming with original, algorithmic search engines. It now owns three of the Big Four.
Yahoo! will most likely have a good search site, that's almost on par with Google, but it probably won't be until the summer until that technology is completely spread across its site and every morcel of the Google index is removed.
Cheers,
Doug
You're a troll. The person was not stating fact that's what business is; they were expressing an opinion. Now, be nice and quit being a -- pardon my French -- asshole.
All the best, Doug
Re:Given that they need the money, I doubt it.
on
EMC To Acquire VMware
·
· Score: 5, Informative
VMware had filed its intention to go public in July of this year, and every indication was that process was proceeding normally. Analysts expected them to make their public markets debut soon. I suppose EMC, which has been on a buying spree with billion-dollar buyouts of both content management technology provider Documentum and storage management provider Legato Systems earlier this year, made an offer VMware just could not refuse. It had to be good, because they were expected to make several hundred million from an IPO.:)
In my opinion, while the interview is indeed intriguing to read, this story should never have been approved nor posted. It's proprietary, closed-source software and the so-called "inventors" are assholes.
In reality, something as technologically groundbreaking should be open source, instead of some proprietary technology where the inventors want to make a quick buck. In all honesty, these people are worse than the telecom industry because atleast the telecom industry doesn't lie about making money -- these guys do.
Cheers, Doug
Re:buying a potential anti-trust lawsuit?
on
Novell Buys Ximian
·
· Score: 1
I doubt that. Novell is pretty much vendor neutral. They make their products for Windows, and aren't going to stop that. Linux is the natural extension to their products.
I agree, I think Novell paid somewhere between $20 and $30 million for Ximian, which is a good deal for both companies. Ximian is worth that, Novell has the cash to buy it, and Ximian's venture capitalists will be pleased with the 20 to 50 percent premium on their original investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Cleveland? Give me a break! He's got to be the worst Family Guy character, other than maybe Chris Griffin.
I have to agree, a spinoff set around Quagmire or the guy in the wheelchair would be much better. Or, what about the old pervert from the Griffins' neighbourhood?
Cheers,
Doug
Actually, Name Development Ltd. was rumoured to be highly profitable pre-buyout by Marchex several years ago. (Interestingly, Name Development was a pioneer in "direct navigation and monetization" with its infamous Ultimate Search-branded parking pages with the yellow and blue layout and cute little googly-eyed computer monitor creature as a logo on all parked domains' placeholder pages.) They were rumoured to be doing something like $20 million in annual revenues with $17 million in net income, with less than a dozen paid staffers. Everyone's draws dropped at those numbers.
Hope this helps,
Doug Mehus
Correction again. From the press release, it states they've acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., and (presumably) have 100% ownership (in exchange for a combination of cash-and-stock). They're acquiring the source code to LiveJournal, and all its infrastructure components.
I've got a more thorough write-up on my blog:
dmehus.blogspot.com
I use Blogger because of its permalink and post editing abilities, but I am considering either a switch to MSN Spaces or (possibly, and I stress this word heavily) back to LiveJournal -- if it can make major changes.
Cheers,
Doug
I disagree. Yahoo! could've bought Napster (the company formerly known as Roxio) for roughly the same price, based on the latest ROXI market capitalization and stock quote figures. Plus, they already have a co-branded Yahoo!/Napster distribution deal. The reason they didn't? Napster is bleeding red ink. Musicmatch, if I'm not mistaken, has been profitable for over a year (perhaps more). Though, I'm not sure *how* profitable as they're privately held.
Cheers,
Doug
First Post!
Doug
The Terra Lycos banner will appear on all Lycos Inc. sites until the transaction is complete, expected by September 2nd or 3rd at the latest.
:)
Yes, Daum will own both the Wired magazine and Wired News site.
The sites Daum buys include (not going to bother to provide links as I'm too lazy to type all the extra code):
Angelfire, Gamesville, HotBot, Hotwired (including Animation Express and Webmonkey), HTML Gear, Lycos.com, Lycos Zone, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Who Where, Wired, and Wired News.
Terra Networks retains the following properties:
A Tu Hora, Invertia.com, Rumbo.com, Terra.com, and its stake in Lycos Europe
Cheers,
Doug
Wow, my first time as the 2nd post to a thread. Okay, that was stupid. (Let's hope it doesn't ruin my excellent karma; just leave it at a score of 1 or something.)
Cheers,
Doug
The compose message function in My Way sucks ass, actually. If you bold something, it makes the rest of the text after it bold on the receiver's end. The whole system they use for composing messages is flawed. It's hard to describe, though.
And My Way survives by the Google advertisements. Its owner, Interactive Search Holdings, was recently acquired by Ask Jeeves. ISH also owns Excite and iWon, and in fact, I predict that Ask Jeeves will model Excite and iWon after My Way by removing all pop-up ads network wide.
Cheers,
Doug
The pain and numbness in your hand are definitely symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive stress injury. I'm 20 and I suffer the same thing.
Fortunately, there are solutions to relieve the symptoms.
First, I use a wrist brace/splint from Futuro. You can buy one from drugstore.com, though I got mine from the pharmacy or health/wellness department of Zellers. They range in price from $16 to $25, depending on where you buy it from and what country you live in. Definitely well worth it, though.
As well, try and get outside more. I admit I'm not the best at this, but I do take the dog for regular walks every day and try and do other outdoor chores.
You could also try lifting some five pound dumb bells and doing regular exercises for your wrists that way.
Hope this helps,
Doug
Yes, it does and percent should've been the correct word -- not cent. Sorry.
80% for ads clicked on an Ask Jeeves Web property, with 20% going to Google.
Cheers,
Doug
Ask Jeeves distributes paid advertising (both in search results and contextually targeted ads on content pages) from the Google AdWords program. Ask Jeeves takes 80 cents per click on a text ad from the AdWords program, with Google taking a 20 cent cut.
Hope this helps,
Doug
My bet is on Ask Jeeves. They're profitable and have sustained positive cash flow. Lycos makes sense for Jeeves.
If not Jeeves, I'll bet either InfoSpace or Primedia subsidiary About, Inc.
Cheers,
Doug
Verity, Inc. bought the enterprise Web search assets of Inktomi and Infoseek and is commonly used as the enterprise search appliance of choice at many large corporations. It renamed the product Verity Ultraseek.
Excite is now owned by Interactive Search Holdings, along with iWon and My Way. ISH is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ask Jeeves, which Jeeves paid $343 million for in March.
Cheers,
Doug
No. Terra Networks wants to sell its entire Lycos, Inc. subsidiary for approximately $200 million -- not just the domain name.
Lycos, Inc. includes: Angelfire, HTML Gear, Lycos Mail, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Webmonkey/Hotwired, and Wired News. It also has partnerships to create several co-branded Web sites. So, there are very valuable assets here.
My prediction: Ask Jeeves is likely thinking very heavily about acquiring Lycos to expand its distribution further. (It recently acquired Interactive Search Holdings for $343 million in cash and stock. ISH assets include Excite, iWon, My Search, and My Way, to name a few.) The more distribution Ask Jeeves has, the more money it can demand from Google -- which accounts for 70% of Ask Jeeves revenue. It currently takes 80 cents on the dollar, with Google taking 20 cents. With the purchase of ISH, Jeeves can probably demand 85. With Lycos too, it could quite easily get 90 cents. So, financially and strategically, Lycos would make sense for Jeeves.
Other possible candidates who might be interested in Lycos include InfoSpace, Primedia subsidiary About, Inc., or possibly even Google itself.
Lycos won't die -- it'll just change hands and be restructured. I guarantee it.
Cheers,
Doug
Check out the filing:
5 04059332/ds1.htm
www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1126167/000119312
It names quite a few of the advertisers, and some of them are large companies such as travel and hotel conglomerate Cendant and LowerMyBills.com.
As well, Brightmail, Advertising.com, and Shopping.com also filed IPO paperwork.
Cheers,
Doug
... and she's not even in Canada! She has her own concert hall/hotel in Las Vegas that she owns and performs in nearly every day of the year!
Cheers,
Doug
ICANN has made numerous unpopular decisions throughout its corporate life. So has VeriSign. This is truly a battle of two evils. Which one is the lesser evil, in your opinion?
i gn.complaint .p1of2.022604.pdf
i nt .p2of2.022604.pdf
In my own personal view, I do hope ICANN emerges from this lawsuit as the "victor". If VeriSign were to win its request for an injunction against ICANN, and on the broader claim that ICANN "unlawfully transformed itself from a technical coordination body to the de-facto Internet regulator," I feel it would have far-reaching implications for all of us. It would effectively muzzle ICANN and give VeriSign free reign to do as it pleases with the Internet -- at least until a legislative change was made, such as making ICANN into a government regulatory agency similar to the FCC. Mind you, that might be a good thing. It might force the Bush administration's conservative laissez-faire approach to Internet governance to get a dramatic overhaul and become more regulatory. Another plus to ICANN becoming a taxpayer-funded government regulatory body, it could keep its acronym and be enshrined into law as the Internet Commission for Assigned Names and Numbers. Or, it could become the Internet Naming and Numbering Agency -- or INNA.
Nonetheless, this will be a bitter battle.
It also has high stakes for VeriSign. If VeriSign is unsuccessful, it will almost certainly ensure that the dot-net gTLD is redelegated to a new operator later this year.
My take,
Doug
P.S. Copies of the complaint:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/veris
and
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/verisign.compla
This ruling may actually have its merits. It is the first appellate court decision of its kind to rule on the legitimacy of squatters, or less than stellar companies, piggy-backing on trademarked terms as search keywords in sponsored results. It will set precedent, by whatever happens at trial in the district court.
:)
Further, it's also good because it is yet-another-blow to "seedy" companies like Claria and WhenU, which install so-called "adware" on users' computers and then produce pop-up ads when the user visits a Web site of the competitor of the very sleezy advertiser.
I'm all for reduced patents and trademark giveaways, but something like this, is a good ruling.
The district court got it wrong.
However, Playboy may have to refile its suit since, at the time, Excite was still owned by the now defunct/dissolved Excite@Home. It was since purchased by Focus Interactive and InfoSpace. And since then, Focus Interactive bought out InfoSpace's remaining stake and now wholly owns Excite.
So their suit may have to target Focus Interactive now.
Cheers,
Doug
No, MetaCrawler is still a meta-search engine and does have paid listings, as well. It, along with meta-search engines Dogpile, Go2Net, and WebCrawler, are owned by the slimmed down InfoSpace. They all feature algorithmic results from AltaVista (owned by Yahoo! subsidiary Overture Services its sale by dot-com flameout and once popular incubation group CMGi), AlltheWeb (another Yahoo! web property), Google, Inktomi, and WiseNut (LookSmart's algorithmic search engine). As you can see, Yahoo! is swimming with original, algorithmic search engines. It now owns three of the Big Four. Yahoo! will most likely have a good search site, that's almost on par with Google, but it probably won't be until the summer until that technology is completely spread across its site and every morcel of the Google index is removed. Cheers, Doug
You're a troll. The person was not stating fact that's what business is; they were expressing an opinion. Now, be nice and quit being a -- pardon my French -- asshole.
All the best,
Doug
VMware had filed its intention to go public in July of this year, and every indication was that process was proceeding normally. Analysts expected them to make their public markets debut soon. I suppose EMC, which has been on a buying spree with billion-dollar buyouts of both content management technology provider Documentum and storage management provider Legato Systems earlier this year, made an offer VMware just could not refuse. It had to be good, because they were expected to make several hundred million from an IPO. :)
Cheers,
Doug
Full details of the lawsuit are available in this press release:p ?epi-content=GENERIC&newsId=20030918005730&newsLan g=en&beanID=478837757&viewID=news_view
home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.js
Copy of lawsuit:
search.netster.com/about/lawsuit.asp
Sorry, I forgot to include these links in my submission. Post away!
Cheers,
Doug
In my opinion, while the interview is indeed intriguing to read, this story should never have been approved nor posted. It's proprietary, closed-source software and the so-called "inventors" are assholes.
In reality, something as technologically groundbreaking should be open source, instead of some proprietary technology where the inventors want to make a quick buck. In all honesty, these people are worse than the telecom industry because atleast the telecom industry doesn't lie about making money -- these guys do.
Cheers,
Doug
I doubt that. Novell is pretty much vendor neutral. They make their products for Windows, and aren't going to stop that. Linux is the natural extension to their products.
Best,
Doug
I agree, I think Novell paid somewhere between $20 and $30 million for Ximian, which is a good deal for both companies. Ximian is worth that, Novell has the cash to buy it, and Ximian's venture capitalists will be pleased with the 20 to 50 percent premium on their original investment.
Cheers,
Doug