The latest from TechCrunch
- Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com
- Corel Buys Out Corel
- Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products
| Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com | Top |
| The domain name russia.com has been purchased by an undisclosed buyer for $1.5 million through marketplace Sedo , reports Yakov Sadchikov over on the Quintura blog . Currently an online guide for travelers who would like to visit the country, Russia.com is an operation of Paley Media , a Seattle, WA-based consultancy firm that runs the show for many a country domain name, including Algeria.com, Scotland.com, Nepal.com and Ukraine.com. The domain names are themselves owned by NewMedia Holdings , a company that registered the domain name russia.com back in 1995. It’s unclear why NewMedia / Paley Media decided to offload the high-value domain name, but I reckon one million and a half dollars is a fair price for a website that currently attracts a mere 9,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete . On the other hand, Korea.com was sold earlier this year for a reported $5 million. We recently wrote about dominance of number of .com domains and also noted that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. It looks like values of .com domains may be rising again: insurance broker Insure.com just sold its name and corresponding website for a whopping $16 million last month. Other large domain purchases this year include the sale of Candy.com for $3 million, Toys-R-Us’ acquisition of Toys.com for $5.1 million, the sale of Fly.com to Travelzoo for $1.8 million, and the sale of Ad.com for $1.4 million. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Corel Buys Out Corel | Top |
| Apologies for the confusing headline, but I couldn’t resist. This morning, long-time software maker Corel Corporation turned over full ownership to Corel Holdings, a limited partnership controlled by an affiliate of Vector Capital , majority investor of the company behind many familiar software programs like WordPerfect, CorelDRAW, WinZip, Paint Shop Pro and WinDVD (most of them obtained through acquisition of smaller software firms). The LP of the private equity investment firm, which already owned approximately 68% of the Corel Corporation, announced this morning that it has successfully completed its tender offer to purchase all outstanding common shares of the company, evidently not including those owned by Corel Holdings and its affiliates. The shares were purchased, in cash, at a unit price of $4.00, excluding interest and less applicable withholding taxes. Painful, because Vector had already offered to buy the company for $11 per share in March 2008. With benefit of hindsight, Corel should have probably accepted that offer, of course. Corel Holdings is now commencing an offering period of its tender offer to acquire all remaining common shares of Corel Corporation, which will expire at December 4, 2009. Vector Capital assumed control over Corel Corp for a reported $133 million in 2003. The VC firm subsequently moved to take the company public in 2006, but retained majority ownership. The partial spin-off wasn’t much of a hit : Corel initially priced its IPO at $18 to $20 and later revised that to $16. But the company saw shares open at $15.36, and it has never once traded above that price (as is often the case when stocks open at a lower price point than initially set). Shares currently change hands for about one quarter of the opening price. Corel Corp earlier this week justified the offer to take the company private, saying that complete ownership is necessary to inject capital quickly and avert a default on its loans. The company, once a fierce rival to Microsoft on the productivity software playing field, had been on the ropes for quite some time now. Corel was required to keep its total debt level below 2.75 times its trailing 12-month EBITDA, but on Monday indicated that it expected to fail that test this month. The economic downturn sure rocked this company, established in 1985, very hard. Let’s see how it will fare now that it’s under Vector’s wings in its entirety again. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products | Top |
| If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO – not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods). The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes , a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics). Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet. Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader , which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated). Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well. Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
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