Couple of interesting acquistions
Posted on May 30, 2007 in Acquisitions | Comments (0)
First off it's Ebay has acquired StumbleUpon. This is a somewhat surprising but I imagine that it's the case that the first major media buyer who made an offer in StumbleUpon's price range.
I don't really think that Stumbleupon is the "digg for websites" like Erick Schonfeld does. Digg is the digg for websites don't ya know? I tend to think that Stumbleupon is the Geocities of it's time. Cool play for the investors but no one talks about it a few years later. I have tried it a couple of times but I suspect that Ebay is buying it merely to have yet another distribution channel for ads and auction results. While I am sure their group of 2 million users are pretty nice, it seems like a distribution channel to me. I am not sure how useful their StumbleUpon set of sites will be to the auction giant.
Google also made another small acquisition. Google acquired Green Border, a Mountain View based malware and security vendor. It's a typical acquisition since it's a small but talented group of engineers who make a product that might be integrated into Google's various offerings.
GreenBorder Pro for consumers and GreenBorder Corporate for enterprises -- protect Internet-connected computers by setting up temporary, isolated sessions each time a user goes online. By virtualizing the Windows Windows hosting solutions with 24x7x365 support – Visit HostMySite.com operating system Manage remotely with one interface -- the HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server., it contains any malicious code and minimizes its effect on the rest of the desktop.
