The latest from TechCrunch
- 3M Captures Attenti For $230 Million
- CEOs For Sale! Come and Get Your CEOs!
- Google Chrome Is The New "Down For Everyone Or Just Me"
- Chatroulette Goes Limp, Again
| 3M Captures Attenti For $230 Million | Top |
| Tel Aviv-based Attenti announced today its acquisition by 3M, most notably the makers of Post-Its, to the tune of $230 million in cash. Formerly Dmatek, Attenti is the world’s leading supplier of remote people-tracking technologies such as ankle bracelets, voice recognition devices and alcohol monitoring technologies. The purchase, which will benefit 3M by providing the company with GPS and radio frequency technology, is the second in a line of security-related acquisitions this week; 3M bought fingerprint ID company Cogent Inc yesterday for $943 million. Yoav Reisman, Attenti CEO on the sale: “3M’s culture of innovation fits well with our own and its R&D capabilities and global reach will help accelerate the growth of our business.” Francisco Partners and the Israeli branch of Sequoia Capital jointly invested in Attenti in December of 2008, the sale represents a hefty exit for both. CrunchBase Information Attenti 3M Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| CEOs For Sale! Come and Get Your CEOs! | Top |
| I've heard from two sources close to the Digg CEO search that there were a glut of good candidates. That’s something companies always say, and I frankly found it hard to believe. I don't necessarily mean that as a knock on Digg. I was surprised there were a ton of "great" CEO candidates to run any company in the unsexy critical-mass-but-not-flavor-of-the-month category— period . Both sources told me the same thing: The existence of a secondary market means that top talent is churning through startups faster than ever. While Digg's eventual hire was Matt Williams formerly of old-man-of-the-Internet Amazon, sources told me that potential candidates were also coming from hot, pre-IPO Web darlings. I've asked around and had a few entrepreneurs and VCs confirm the trend: The secondary market is upping the talent churn to levels not seen in the Valley since the late 1990s. Then, it was because companies were being started and going public within 18 months. Now it's because a new Wild West asset class of secondary private stock trades are having a similar effect—with everyone in Silicon Valley's new favorite substitute for the IPO. I was particularly surprised to hear some entrepreneurs and VCs say they are getting senior management candidates from Zynga. Zynga?! Isn't Zynga still newly hot enough to be the one doing the poaching? It bears noting that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is a hard-driving entrepreneur, and some of those looking for other jobs may not be exactly missed, just as the revolving management door in the early days of Facebook wasn't necessarily, shall we say, unwelcome. Still, assuming this as widespread as I'm hearing, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the Valley? It depends on what you do here. If you're looking to climb the corporate startup ladder, it's great because you can respectably job hop and still cash out at a faster rate. If you're good, or at least able to make people think you are good, you move up with each hop. But if you're looking to build a company, the trend is brutal because the talent is churning too fast to, well, actually build a real company . At a high level, there's an argument that it makes the Valley's greater ecosystem more mercenary and one that it makes it less mercenary. It's more mercenary because startups attract more people who want a quick equity flip. Remember the scourge of blue-shirts-and-khakis in the late 1990s? No one wants that back, except maybe the Bubble Lounge . On the flipside (pun intended), at least the mercenaries have a way to get out—meaning those who stick around are those who care about the mission. And we're not talking about an immediate flip—this new reality only holds for the companies hot enough to have a secondary market for their shares or a big deal like those being done by Elevation and DST. It's by any measure, still a pretty contained scourge compared to 1999. But it's also one that by its very definition includes the companies startups are most likely to want to poach from. But one thing it does for sure is cement the Valley as the place to start a consumer Web company. It is apparently easier than ever to assemble a team if the hype, valuation and idea are right. CrunchBase Information Digital Sky Technologies Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Elevation Partners Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Matt Williams Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Chrome Is The New "Down For Everyone Or Just Me" | Top |
| You hit a site; it’s down. You immediately reload; it’s still down. You start to freak out. “How the hell are they down again!? Is anyone in charge over there?! WTF?!” But quite often, it’s just you. And you look like an ass for your rant that you just spewed on Twitter (or on Facebook when it’s Twitter that is down). Thankfully, it looks like Chrome can now potentially save you from that embarrassment. Tech geeks are very familiar with sites like Down For Everyone Or Just Me (which was incidentally created by a then-Twitter employee and sold earlier this year). You go there, enter a URL and see if others people around the world are having trouble accessing the site as well. But the latest version of Chrome appears to do the same thing for you now, as the blog Rudefox pointed out today . While trying to load Chatroutlette today ( like the rest of us ) only to find that it was down, the author got a fairly typical browser note that “ Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to chatroulette.com. ” But what’s interesting is that below that, it reads “ Other users are also experiencing difficulties connecting to this site, so you may have to wait a few minutes. “ See, there are some benefits to Google watching us. They can now save us a trip to Down For Everyone Or Just Me. [thanks Tom] CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Down For Everyone Or Just Me Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Chatroulette Goes Limp, Again | Top |
| At the risk of flogging a dead horse : Chatroulette is currently down. Again ? Yes, again . This time, no promises of an updated and redesigned version launching ‘tomorrow’ or ‘shortly’. If you’re lucky enough to even get the website address to resolve, you’ll be looking at a nice ’403 Forbidden’ or ’500 Internal Server Error’ page, or some nginx Web server landing page. Which could of course mean there’s someone tinkering on the site right now and about to hit the launch button on the real next-generation, penis-free version of Chatroulette, not the underwhelming version that went live earlier this week. Update: seems to be back up now, at least partially in some browsers. The underwhelming v2, that is. Keep refreshing, voyeuristic boys and girls. What’s that? What do you mean you don’t care anymore? But it’s Chatroulette! It’s the future of online video communication! Hello? CrunchBase Information Chatroulette! Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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