Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Google seems to hit them when and where you don’t expect it. Now they have acquired Postini. What I really like about the Google acquisition strategy is that it does not seem to be fueled by hype but is a real long term strategy. Let’s look at the last few Google acquisitions starting 2006 as I feel like it ;):

1. dMarc Broadcasting for radio ads … ok, they want to do radio ads and they did not have the radio experience, so it’s a non brainer.
2. Measure Map for Blog analysis … they are building out Google Analytics so it was probably for the team. The analytics part just gives them oodles of data.
3. Upstartle for Writely … they need an online office for their entire Hosted Pro scheme. This was well before the pro part of Google Hosted came out.
4. @Last Software for SketchUp … must have been cheap … at least I still can’t use the software but ok, I might not be the target group
5. Orion for advanced search methods or rather for a cool algo by Ori Allon … so “team” buy
6. Neven Vision for image search typ things and more research power.
7. JotSpot for the entire Google Hosted push … it’s a really good wiki though awfully slow at the moment.
8. YouTube … probably also knowing that you want to integrate videos into search and then you’ll send oodles of traffic and hence want to own the site anyway.
9. Endoxon again a team buy of a team of experts in mapping in Europe.
10. Adscape for video game ads … everyone wants to have something in there. Better than hiring a team.
11. Trendalyzer … ok just watch Hans Rosling perform (and I mean perform) at TED and you know they just wanted to make sure he can continue his research. Hans now has a video blog via google
12. Tonic Systems is a presentation software to complement their Google Hosted tools.
13. Marratch is for video conferencing which again helps the hosted part.
14. Greenborder is about entireprise desktop security.
15. Panoramio is a geo photo sharing thing and if they want to move local it’s good and again the same thing as YouTube, if you are sending tons of traffic there anyway …
16. FeedBurner … something lacking in their stats was RSS. There now.
17. PeakStream … who better to buy something about parallel processing
18. Zenter … ok, with Tonic Systems … this presentation thing seems to be hard
19. GrandCentral … I presume this is also a local advertising play, useful for their extensive VoIP number routing knowledge.
20. Postini is again about security.

So if you look at it, they are buying stuff to complement what they need strategically, not really to have it make money for them directly. They need presentations, security, local ads, new markets/channels for ads, good teams, … . Really looking forward to seeing what they buy next. Up till now I do like it.

Update: Just saw this post on the Google blog welcoming the team from Postini.  Nice bit of information: Over 1000 small businesses sign up each day. We use it for some time now here at Ormigo and are happy with it. Good to see usage is growing.

Ok, Yahoo! is getting scary. They now bought Flickr, which was rumored for some time but now is public. Technorati is already lighting up and this will surely be the talk of the day. First rumors I heard are around $40 million on very light revenue but I will likely change this around when I have the time to read more.

All in all I will have to see if I should not invest in YHOO. They bought Oddpost, my then eMail client, and then opened up their entire search system via an API. They going full force on blogging and now bought Flickr. If anything, they are getting cool for the hip and that means the hip go to Yahoo! and that means Yahoo! will possibly do good. More thinking needed but Yahoo! is starting to be one cool company looking at this from this side.

I thought it was just a rumor and probably untrue, but there we have it, Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines and the blogosphere is once again on fire. John Battelle has a few sentences from the people involved and presumes that the sale price was well above $25 Million, which I can only agree with. You can also check out what Mark Fletcher has to say himself, mostly being a few reassuring words that this was a great deal for all involved and things won’t change. The new Ask Jeeves Blog als has a post about the deal and they seem to be very committed to keeping this going in the right direction. No wonder, if you look at the size of Bloglines via alexa.com! Bloglines also added a special acquisition faq. Interesting to note there is that Mark Fletcher and his engineering team will remain onboard and guide the company. So there really wasn’t a meaningful sales staff yet I presume.

Looking at the Ask Jeeves Corporate Site there are some potential guesses as to where the synergies might end up with. Obviously, and already said by Mark himself, Teoma is a good thing for Bloglines to exploit and to bring really powerful search into their backend. In relation to making money some time down the road, MaxOnline seems to be a very good fit, as they seem to have a good sales force to sell advertising and already have some interesting solutions that can be further enhanced with knowledge gained through Bloglines. I really like Boomerang by the way, which tracks users on a corporate site and then allows the company to buy ads on the Ask Network. Very nice. Please show people that are interested in Apple only Apple ads via the entire network.

Their My Jeeves Beta also looks very interesting and the option to save your search results fits very well to the clipping mechanism in Bloglines. Integrating Teoma, allowing me to search related stuff to an article, allowing me to clip all that, categorize it for later retrieval, search over my clips, within my RSS feeds and searches, … this could get really interesting. Targetted advertising with this knowledge can be amazing.