Posts tagged Acquisition
After the Acquisition: Xmarks One Year Later
Dec 20th
Last year Xmarks, the cross-platform bookmark sync service, narrowly escaped being shut down for good. After tons of media attention focused on the shutdown, and then acquisition by LastPass, a funny thing happened – the service received almost no attention at all in 2011. So whatever happened? I caught up with LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist about the features added to Xmarks this year, the fate of the original Xmarks team and what he calls anti-competitive behavior on Apple’s part.
Sponsor
Xmarks has a long history. The startup launched in 2006 as Foxmarks with the Foxmarks Firefox extension and Foxcloud WebDAV server and morphed into Xmarks in 2009.
Unfortunately, the company was trying to find a way to monetize the service without directly charging users. In the “long live Xmarks” post, former Xmarks CEO James Joaquin said that the original strategy was to “crowd-source bookmarks at scale and then aggregate and analyze that data to create valuable new web services that tens of millions of users would use every day.”
That didn’t work out so well. Early freemium models were also “discouraging,” with few people providing a donation when downloading Xmarks and conservative revenue estimates with Xmarks’ user base at less than $400,000 per year. (That’s assuming $10 per year per user, with two million users.) But when the company announced it’d be shutting down, the outcry prompted a last-minute effort to find a buyer.
The Bad News
The buyer, LastPass, jumped in and saved the service and added a premium account at $12 per year that provides access to users on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Dolphin HD users. It also provides longer storage of backups, open tab sync on mobile browsers and priority support via email. A combo subscription to LastPass and Xmarks is available for $20 a year.
So the service was saved, but what about the Xmarks team? That’s the bad news. According to LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist, “by the time we purchased Xmarks, a good deal of the employees had been let go. We didn’t have much of an opportunity to pick up much of the team. We had a few of the people for the first 120 days or so, but now they’ve moved on… none of the original team is currently working on Xmarks.”
New Features and Integration with LastPass
One reason you might have heard little about Xmarks is because the pace of features and releases has slowed considerably since the acquisition.
According to Siegrist, LastPass “inherited a lot of technical debt. Most of the year was spent bringing all the products up to our level of expectations with them.
Which isn’t to say there’ve been no new features. Siegrist says that Xmarks has added open tab sync across all browsers this year, as well as “behind-the-scenes improvements of the syncing algorithms.” Siegrist also says that the company plans to put out a new backend shortly.
When the acquisition was announced, there were plans to merge LastPass and Xmarks, but that’s still in progress. Siegrist says that “when we realized the depths of the technical stuff we needed to do, we decided it was prudent to ensure we got a much better technical grounding on the base before we made massive changes.”
In the meantime, the company has encouraged users to switch to LastPass for their password sync, instead of using the Xmarks password sync.
Adoption and Acceptance
As you might guess, it makes people a bit twitchy when a company announces it’s going to close up shop. Even when a savior swoops in, users (and potential users) are going to be a bit hesitant.
Siegrist says that “it took a while for people to be comfortable that it was not going away. It took probably four or five months” for the service to return to its previous usage levels and start to grow.
But the upside for LastPass is that the acquisition brought in a bunch of new users for that service as well. Siegrist says that they got “hundreds of thousands of new users out of it, people who hadn’t heard of LastPass” before the company bought Xmarks.
And he says he’s confident that the market is growing as well. Xmarks might be regarded as a “power user” tool, but Siegrist says it’s starting to move into the mainstream. He also notes that the service provided by Xmarks is particularly important in a world where so many users use one browser at home, and another at work. The rapid uptake of Chrome is another factor here.
The Apple in the Ointment
One of the things I was curious about was the experience developing for all of the major browsers, particularly given the rapid development cycle for Firefox and Chrome. Siegrist says that they’re happy there’s a lot of competition, especially since that encourages users to use Xmarks to sync between the browsers.
Despite all the talk of the “open” Web, the browser vendors aren’t going out of their way to make it easy for users to switch browsers. According to Siegrist, all of the browser vendors want to “own the entirety of it” rather than helping users sync information between browsers.
Apple, however, seems to be the worst of the lot. According to Siegrist, Apple “went from not really being competitive to becoming a competitor [with iCloud] and deprecating the APIs that we use. They used their clout and base, created a new product and started locking out competitors.” Apple deprecated the SyncServices APIs in 10.7 without much warning to developers.
Apple annoyances aside, though, Siegrist seemed positive about the future of Xmarks. Development is continuing and looks to speed up a bit in 2012, with integration with LastPass somewhere in the future.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Qwerly’s Acquisition: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Nov 1st
Social data discovery API service Qwerly has been acquired by social marketing data provider Fliptop, the companies announced late last night. Qwerly was a European startup that allowed developers to provide information like a person’s Twitter profile or email address and would then return links to their corresponding profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. In other words, it is a tool that helps you better understand the people you know, it points you to where they share their thoughts and experiences online, programmatically. (See: Qwerly Hopes to Power Rebel Alliance Against Facebook)
Fliptop, which acquired Qwerly, is a little written-about social media marketing platform that does similar things, just better, faster and with an explicit aim at marketers. Ultimately all beautiful things must bow down before the god of marketing; human communication has no meaning beyond the opportunity it provides for one person to sell something to another.
Sponsor
“The motivation to build Qwerly was really the question ‘what do we need to build a decentralized social web platform?’ and what we came up with was ‘first, we need to find out how profiles are connected’, i.e. consolidating identities across profiles,” Qwerly founder Max Niederhofer told ReadWriteWeb in January. “We looked at what had happened there in terms of open protocols, like webfinger, and figured things weren’t moving fast enough.”
From data rebel for decentralization to marketing tool in under twelve months, how’s that for things moving fast enough? It’s not the player I mean to criticize, it’s the game. Startup companies have to make money and people aren’t willing to pay for a lot that we ought to (in my opinion). If you were to tell people you enabled anyone to swipe through lit-up full-screen, epoch-defining great works of art from around the world on a nearly paper-thin device, while listening to music, people would yawn. No, the internet would rather put real kittens in a USB powered blender and make virtual goods come out, pooped into an idiotic Zynga pseudo-world, now that people would pay for!
But learning where people publish their thoughts, dreams, plans and photos online? Why else would someone pay to know more about another person but for the leverage it provides to acquire that person’s money? Qwerly’s broad vision (as I’ve always been excited about it at least) of providing value to developers of all kinds of applications, which might then be useful in learning about the world, one another, the human condition, art, science, beauty and love, clearly offers too little tangible value to be supported by the market. That’s not what the internet is for, people.
Qwerly users will be allowed to continue using the company’s data as it transitions to its new home, but the long term prospects of any project that would even consider decorating the dark fall through life into our inevitable death and through the sharpened teeth of the undifferentiated marketer are not strong.
Fliptop offers Salesforce integration, though, and that’s pretty cool. Hopefully more interesting things will come out of all this. We’ll see.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Motorola Revive Razr Brand Following Google Acquisition
Oct 20th
This story originally appeared on V3:
Dan Worth wrote Motorola unveils Razr smartphone in first launch since Google deal
BERLIN: Motorola has unveiled the latest addition to its smartphone range with the launch of the Razr, which will run o…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO and Social Media Considerations When Rebranding an Organization or Acquisition – ClickZ News
Sep 21st
|
SEO and Social Media Considerations When Rebranding an Organization or Acquisition
ClickZ News It's a decision that results in such a drastic change, that some granular level details can often go overlooked – such as the potential effects and impacts that the changes may have on SEO strategies. The recent announcement by Netflix that it is … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Pearson Acquisition Brings Online Learning Pressure to States
Sep 17th
Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, acquired Connections Education, one of the country’s largest online learning providers, last night for $400 million in cash.
The bid for Connections, which has been growing at 30% year-over-year, shows that online learning is being driven by the private sector.
Sponsor
Decisions about what type of education a child receives are traditionally made by state legislation, but the acquisition of a strong player like this by a very large publishing company will put pressure on states to make online learning more widely available.
Connection Education’s online learning business, Connections Academy, serves 40,000 students in 21 states. The acquisition will also make for more competition and put pressure on Connections’ biggest rival, K12, to innovate and grow. K12 Inc. considering buying Connections at one point.
Education watchers say that the private enterprise push for K12 education that blends online learning with a traditional classroom approach is going to become the trend for growth. Typically, it has been small, non-profit charter school operators that have pushed online learning efforts.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
U.S. Sues to Block AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile Over Antitrust Concerns
Aug 31st
AT&T’s plans to acquire T-Mobile recieved a setback today when the U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust complaint requesting that the deal be blocked, Bloomberg reported.
The controversial plan, which was announced in March, would result in AT&T paying $39 billion to acquire T-Mobile from its parent company Deutsche Telekom. AT&T touted the merger as a way to roll out Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G networks to more customers and foster innovation. Some of its competitors and a few lawmakers have been more skeptical of the deal, while a group of customers have sued AT&T in an attempt to block the merger.
Sponsor
The Justice Department’s complaint, filed in federal court today, says the merger would be a violation of U.S. antitrust law, a concern voiced by the aforementioned consumer-led lawsuit.
If it were to be approved, the merger would effectively result in a duopoly in the wireless industry, with AT&T and Verizon dominating the space and, some fear, leaving little room for competition and the interests of consumers.
“AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market,” the U.S. filing said.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Big Question (Answered): “How Do You Feel About the Acquisition of Motorola by Google?”
Aug 16th
Yesterday Google announced that they would be acquiring Motorola (here’s why they did it). But we wondered what you thought about the marriage, so we asked you, “How do you feel about the acquisition of Motorola by Google?”
You answered and we culled your responses from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
