Fox Announces Acquistion; Exclusive Video
Michael Arrington
64 comments »
During an interview that I conducted at the Under the Radar event this afternoon, Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, announced that they had acquired one of the 32 companies that presented at the event. He would not, however, say which company it was.
Fox Interactive, a division of News Corp., aquired three companies last year, including MySpace, for a total of $1.3 billion. They have earmarked a further $2 billion for future acquisitions.
Ross also said that he wouldn’t be surprised if “Fox acquired at least five of the companies in the room” soon. Dan Farber, who was first to write about this, confirmed with Ross that it is not MySpace competitor Tagged. That narrows it down to 31 targets:
Below is exclusive video footage of the interview (taken by Keith Teare). The first snippet is Ross saying that he’s acquired someone in the room. The second is footage of his statement that they could acquire 5 more companies in the near future.
I’ve tried taking a stab at narrowing it down to 3 companies.
my mistake above with the link - http://hq.meetro.com/blog.php?p=102
At least it’s not Yahoo! and Google buying up everything. Some competition for them never hurt anyone.
I heard a rumor you almost got in a fight with some guy at the conference today. Are you going to blog about this?
I am pretty sure it’s meetro.com. It’s the only company that makes sense to combine with MySpace. I say the price is around $50 mil range. Let’s see if I get it right!
Talk about a Hollywood moment - dramatic flair, cliff-hanger ending (keep everyone guessing!), rising star (online space), come from behind player, stong leading guy (Rupert) and sequel potential (we’re buying 5 more!). Well done, Ross. The Valley needs more moments like that.
How about Gimzoojo.com . Seems like a good target.
I’m guessing Zojo.com.
This is the silicon valley version of the Royal Rumble. 31 Companies, One will remain.
Quote Of That Clip: Is it Edgeio?
Stealth Mode Acquisitions… Companies get acquired without even knowing it.
My guess for who has been bought: Meetro. MySpace is expanding their IM and Email systems. They just stole (forget his name) from Yahoo! to run that division. Meetro fits perfect as an IM system. They havent fully taken off, so it can be rebranded as MySpace IM without an identity crisis. I love their service.
Riya would be interesting.
Sphere or Wink are second on my list. Fox has been looking for a search engine.
Anything else is just gonna be a surprise.
-Jason L. Baptiste
NewsCorp has regularly been a late joiner who learns a lot from others early mistakes and makes the right acquisitions.
It’d be a particularly awesome irony if it was NowPublic. Fair and Balanced Fox meets citizen journalism–HEAD ON!
My bet is that it is eurekster. eurekster’s pitch to me a while back was we make frienster a million bucks a month via our overture/ search optimization ads. Myspace clearly needs this to boost monitzation.
I just wanna say - brilliant use of video on this post! I hope we see more of that, it really brings the blog alive for those of us not in the Valley.
i agree… nice use of YouTube video to vlog a silicon valley exclusive of an “almost” announcement
My bet is on Meetro, if you guys have used Meetro before, it is the real-time Myspace.
How about Edgeio.com? It has the same crappy feeling of all those awful myspace accounts.
Meetro is platform crippled and limits their audience to the Windows crowd.
Microsoft Windows
2000, XP or higher
5mb of free space
The same as Skype only innovating in the Windows/Intel area. These limitations on the customer base isn’t good in the long term.
Meetro. Myspace + IM.
I thought his comment about “5 more” was very offhand and aspirational versus concrete. Based on their pace (no deals in 5 months), natural integration time, and strategy it could take them a couple of years to buy that many companies in total, let alone from this pool.
The “buy me now” screensaver over the fireplace was precious comic relief and helped to make the interview more casual and interesting. Did you plan it? Great interview. Thanks.
I am so excited about any such sale! I cannot wait to see what our government does with the tax proceeds.
What bothers me about this is people announcing things before they have anything to announce. Does it bothewr anyone else?
We have people announcing products long before they’re realy ready (or even in alpha). We now have acquisitions announced before names are released. This is crazy. News should be newsworthy.
Boo to Fox and anyone else that creates ‘rubbish’ news. That’s not to say they shouldn;t acquire anyone… let’s just get some news with content!
>Vinnie Lauria. Funny as I came here to place my bet on it being Meetro.
Also, Michael A., nice job on the interview. I thought you drew the conversation out very successfully.
Zvents would be a nice cheap acquisition that Fox could really use.
OK. I’ll come clean. Its Tailrank.
Everyone start linking to me
Kevin
I hope everyone realizes that this post represents the nadir of Web 2.0. Anything that was good and real about Web 2.0 9 months ago has finally disappeared behind a glowing haze of meaningless, empty hype.
The guy talking seems pissed off by the other guys’ stupid remarks.
it’s got to be eurekster: they are missing a search asset…
Just joining the dots…
I signed up for a myspace account a while ago, and have never been able to IM anyone from it. The current message when you open the IM window is:
“The IM is busted. It’s not working. It is going to take a few weeks to fix. I will post an announcement when its fixed. -Tom”. From memory, that message or a variation of it (the comment about few weeks is unfamilar?) has been there for a couple of months now.
For a social site to offer IM as a button in its core layout and not be able to deliver it for months suggests it’s something they’re pretty conscious of; thus I’m backing one of the web-based IM cats. Hell, I’ll name Meetro.
Nice piece of distractive commentary if it is them… then again, if the deal’s just waiting on paperwork, the crew probably have plenty of time to put a well considered ghost analysis together while they wait for the lawyers to do their thing…
actually… he says they bought “someone in this room.” this opens up the game a little more… even including folks like imeem who were present
What they ought to do is see if there’s still time to license that new form of PPC advertising at MatchTo.com so they can really give Google a run for its money…
A source at simply hired mentioned to me at tech crunch that they might have something exciting to announce in the next few weekes. Makes sense to me.
I think it’s either Meetro or Popist. I’m not sure if anyone caught the CPC ad-sales portion of the Popist Hotlist, but it sounds like something Myspace could integrate.
I think it will be Meetro and NowPublic.
Then they will buy my site Announce Your Life… LOL
“Meetro. Myspace + IM.” I think also.
Ross Levinsohn announced in an interview with Classified Intelligence yesterday that its Simply Hired
How in the hell do you unblock myspace, or at least get into it if it’s blocked so you can just use it cuz i need to know like now!!!!
interesting, looks like more competition is coming into the video market
The word is spelled Acquisition…..not Acquistion.