The latest from TechCrunch
- Conduit Acquires Web Application Platform Wibiya For $45 Million: Sources
- Instagram Founders: Instagram Is A "New Entertainment Platform" (TCTV)
- Will Social Media Save WrestleMania 27?
| Conduit Acquires Web Application Platform Wibiya For $45 Million: Sources | Top |
| Exclusive - No, Conduit was not acquired for a billion dollars or more by Google or Microsoft … yet (although one executive suggested to me in a phone call this week that the company should, in fact, be worth about half of Facebook’s valuation on the private market – meaning about $35 billion at present day – because they reach about half of the social network’s audience). We’ll see about that. Either way, what’s really happening, according to solid sources close to the company, Conduit is in fact acquiring another Israeli startup in the Web app publishing and distribution space, namely Wibiya , and they added that the deal could close as early as next Monday or Tuesday. According to those people, who are familiar with the negotiations, the transaction hasn’t been signed off yet and the deal could still fall through, although multiple sources I’ve spoken with are confident the acquisition will close soon. I hear that the purchase price is roughly $45 million, which means the deal would give a solid return to both Wibiya’s founders and investors, who have pumped about $2.6 million into the company. Backers include Primera Capital, Yossi Vardi, Oded Vardi and Jeff Pulver. If the acquisition closes, all 17 Wibiya employees are expected to join Conduit. Wibiya essentially enables publishers to add a social layer to their websites , rendering said sites interactive, free of charge, in order to grow their audience organically. It is similar to what Conduit does, although Conduit is mostly known for its Web toolbars and web application marketplace . Complementarity seems to be the key word, here. From what I’ve gathered about the company, Wibiya currently partners with publishers of about 120,000 websites, many of which are small ones, although its customer base also includes the likes of TheStreet.com, Playboy.com and Glam.com. In total, Wibiya is said to reach 200 million unique users, although that is to be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion (even Twitter reportedly boasts less active users than that). Conduit partners with companies like Zynga, Fox, MLB and Time Warner Cable to reach about 230 million unique users , according to its own count. I should note that the company does seem to do extremely well even though those numbers seem to be inflated: it has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2005 and boasts about 250 employees today. CrunchBase Information Wibiya Conduit Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Instagram Founders: Instagram Is A "New Entertainment Platform" (TCTV) | Top |
| Somewhere between yesterday afternoon and last night, Instagram hit 3 million users after only six months of existence. To put that into perspective, that’s like 1% of the population of the US using a service that currently only fully exists on a iPhone. Instagram’s explosive growth has made them the current go-to success story for pivoting and unleashed a torrent of buzz around the white hot photo-sharing space. But founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger don’t think of the service as just a simple way to share images, but as more of mechanism for users to tell stories and discover the world around them, a “new entertainment platform” the co-founders told me in an interview for TCTV yesterday. “By no means do we think of Instagram as just a photo-sharing service,” said Systrom. “It’s something that a lot of people lump us into, but we’d like to think of ourselves as a storytelling service. It’s the way you go out in the world and tell a story about your life, and it’s a new entertainment platform. You can open it up and see a story about what your friends are doing, but also [that] ABC World News is posting photos of someone in Japan reporting on the nuclear crisis. It’s really moving to see those things coming together through images.” During our interview Systrom and Krieger outlined a couple of interesting use cases for the service. Systrom explained how he often goes to demo.instagram.com and observes location-based phenomena like users uploading pictures of the same sunset in Portland and in Seattle. Brands like Burberry who (has over 13,000 followers) hold man-on-the-street Instagram hashtag campaigns like #TheArtOfTrench to help build brand engagement. BravoTV, which just joined the service a couple days ago, photographed and uploaded its entire Top Chef finale to #TCFinale. The founders have a sharp idea of where the service is headed, including how they will eventually handle revenue. Systrom explained, “We’re moving in a very clear direction that will allow us to make money in the future. In the history of advertising the most profitable avenues of advertising have been pushing images to people. As we see outside of the digital world those verticals are struggling in one way or another, money is moving online. We’re going to be one of the largest ways to push images to people, that entertainment platform I was talking to you about. That puts us in a really interesting spot in terms of making money on advertising in the future.” The co-founders are cool with sacrificing short term profits for long term value. “ What is uninteresting to us is charge a user 99 cents and never see them again model. To be a world changing company we need to think bigger than that,” Systrom continues. And while both co-founders do insist that an Android and iPhone app are in the both in the works (they’re “thinking really critically about them” ), their grander goal for the product goes beyond any particular avenue for distribution, “Our vision for Instagram in the long run is seeing the world as it happens through other people’s eyes.” Instagram currently has $7.5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Baseline Ventures as well as investment from angels Chris Sacca, Jack Dorsey and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo. CrunchBase Information Instagram Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Will Social Media Save WrestleMania 27? | Top |
| Well, maybe not "save" WrestleMania, but help ensure it does better than last year's edition, WrestleMania 26, which, at well under one million pay-per-view buys worldwide, was considered a bit of a disappointment. What's different this year is WWE's use of social media—that is to say they're actually using it this time around. But even if this year's edition, WrestleMania 27, which airs from Atlanta tomorrow on pay-per-view, does better than last year's, how much of that can be attributed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how much of that can be attributed to the return of The Rock? Serious business, etc. Read more… | |
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