This news was embargoed until today at 5 AM PST, but Om managed to dig up the facts anyway. Recently reformed Plaxo is announcing the acquisition of online calendaring startup HipCal, which was built by five college students while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York
Plaxo says they will integrate HipCal’s calendaring product directly into Plaxo’s free product, and expand premium calendar services as well. Plaxo, now with 11 million or so members and adding 20,000 per day, is in an excellent position to leverage its address book features into new product lines. Calendaring is an obvious next step.
The size of the aquisition was not announced but is almost certainly single digit millions. Here’s the full text of the press release:
PLAXO TO ACQUIRE WEB 2.0 CALENDAR START-UP HIPCAL
New York Fraternity Brothers Create Upstate UpStart
and Land Silicon Valley Jobs
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—May 1, 2006— Plaxo®, Inc., creator of the smart address book, has agreed to acquire innovative start-up HipCal, developer of an award-winning online calendar service. The acquisition will strengthen Plaxo’s calendar platform, and extend the company’s business model with new revenue-generating offerings.
The HipCal announcement highlights Plaxo’s commitment to providing its members with the best tools and services for accessing and managing all of their personal information on any platform, email client, browser, or mobile device. The addition of HipCal’s team and technology will dramatically accelerate Plaxo’s efforts in the calendar space, bringing lifestyle management tools such as appointment management, iCal publication and subscription, and group calendars to Plaxo members by the end of 2006.
Fraternity Brothers Head to The Valley
Five fraternity brothers originated HipCal while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), located in Troy, New York. The team quickly realized their online calendar and to-do list was more than a success among friends — lots of people were using it. They decided to turn school project into a business and HipCal immediately took off — inside and outside of RPI. In less than six months, the beta grew to thousands of subscribers and garnered awards from both South by Southwest (SXSW) and SEOmoz.org’s Web 2.0 Awards.
“Our goal with HipCal was simply to create a calendar that makes sense,” said Garret Heaton, co-founder and lead programmer, HipCal. “While we created a fantastic online calendar, as a standalone service, we realized more could be done to achieve its fullest potential. Together with Plaxo, we can give people one central, easily accessible service for all the information they need to organize their personal and professional lives.”
“In the less than four years, Plaxo has fundamentally changed the way people think about the address book,” said Ben Golub, president and CEO, Plaxo, Inc. “With the addition of the skilled HipCal team, we plan to do for the calendar what we did for the address book. The combined Plaxo/HipCal vision will result in the most complete and convenient solution for accessing and updating all of your personal information, and for helping you to stay organized and in-touch with friends, colleagues, customers, and family.”
Today, Plaxo offers a smart, self-updating address book that is accessible from any web-enabled device. Plaxo also provides members with universal access to their calendar, tasks and notes. An enhanced, fully integrated and always-accessible calendar raises the bar on what an address book should do giving Plaxo a distinct competitive advantage because it is the natural tie-in with the address book.
Plaxo will acquire all assets of HipCal, including the technologies, for an undisclosed amount. The five founders will become Plaxo employees, but will continue to maintain the HipCal service until its functionality can be incorporated into Plaxo. Plaxo intends to incorporate all of the existing HipCal functionality into its free service. In addition, Plaxo will develop premium, calendar-related services.
About Plaxo
Plaxo, Inc., (www.plaxo.com) is used by over 10 million people in over 83 countries, and enjoys a wide following in academia, government, and both small and large businesses, including 98 of the Fortune 100 companies. Plaxo makes it easy for members to connect to their personal information, friends and colleagues in the manner that is most appropriate. The company has created a network of people whose contact information is always up-to-date through seamless address book updating that occurs between linked members. Plaxo Premium Services expand the functionality of Plaxo and include Plaxo Address Book Optimizer, Plaxo eCards, Plaxo Mobile Access, and Plaxo VIP Support.
Founded in 2001, Plaxo is a privately held company funded by leading investment and technology firms – Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Platforms, Harbinger Venture Management and Cisco Systems – as well as individual investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle.
About HipCal
HipCal is an online calendar, to-list, and address book developed by fraternity brothers, Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, Tawheed Kader, Glenn Dixon, as undergraduates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2005. The award-winning lifestyle management tool and development team was acquired by Plaxo, Inc. in May 2006.
Press Contact:
Mischa Dunton
Plaxo, Inc.,
650.810.1089
mdunton@plaxo.com
Pamela Preston
Breakaway Communications for Plaxo
212.616.6001
ppreston@breakawaycom.com
Comments
This is interesting news about HipCal (formerly MyPIMP) - so you think it went for just a few million?
The question is why HipCal and not other product (like Kiko2)? Was it cheaper?
How much do you think they got for HipCal?
Hipcal is a pretty good product. One of the few that offers a traditional to-do list in conjunction with the calendar. Hopefully, Plaxo can work to increase the speed of Hipcal.
Where does this add value for a Plaxo user? Why would you bother switching. Sounds silly to me.
Yahoo, Google and MSN already have calendar services so I’m not sure whether or not Plaxo will be able to compete effectively against them or how this will make them a more desireable acquisition target.
What kind of Kool-Aid are you people drinking down in Cali anyway?
As Andrew said, you’ve got all three of the heavywieghts in the online Calendar market, Google having just released.
Exactly what benefit/business sense does it make to aquire a calendar right now? Methinks that come 2 months, the value in such a venture would be next to nothing, so you could scoop it up for nothing if you wanted to (or just link to the big three via API).
Like a lot of stuff on this site, I’m just not getting it… if somebody does, please explain this to me, seriously!
A crazy acquisition.
@razvan
because Kiko sucks!
@zealot :)) it was an example there are plenty out there
It’s almost like you could hear the HipCal developers frantically shopping it around to as many people as possible, spurred on by Google Calendar’s release.
HipCal Dev 1: Dude, Google Calendar.
HipCal Dev 2: Yeah, man.
HipCal Dev 1: If the highest anyone will offer us is $1,000, we’ll take it. OK?
HipCal Dev 2: I’m not a moron, man.
Plaxo: Hey guys, we have absolutely no use for your product since our own guys could make something like HipCal in a few hours (and it wouldn’t freak out come day-light savings time and duplicate everyone’s events), but we understand your plight and we’ve personally pooled together about $900.
HipCal Devs (Uninamously): We’ll take it!
I’d say Plaxo bought it because it’s a darn good product (plus they get the people), and they need it remain competitive. I use HipCal having checked out many of the alternatives. Only Google would rival it for my purposes, but it doesn’t have a full year display. For the future a lot will depend how integration aspects develop.
Plaxo has massive amounts of users and access to thier Outlook and who each user knows. Building a calender sharing service out of that is a no brainer in terms of beginning to build value out of the network that Plaxo has built. This probably makes the most sense as one of a series of acquisitions to provide value to the Plaxo user base. As an investor in another calender related company, TimeBridge, I can say that starting with the massive base of users that Plaxo has would be a huge asset. It will be interesting to see how this takes thier viral growth even further now that there is incremental value. Plaxo has been smart about Growth, Usage, Value and getting this order right in a business that is clearly built based on a network.
Plaxo could have built it.
I hope reposting press releases doesnt become a trend here. It’s terribly lazy and offensive to your readers.
Paul, thanks for the swipe, I always enjoy those.
I added the release because it wasn’t online at the time of posting so I couldn’t link to it. I thought some people would like to see the additional information.
Thanks though, its great to be called lazy and offensive. Makes me think staying up all night to post crap at 5 am is totally worth it.
Don’t feed the trolls Michael.
Some really interesting discussion here.
While we at Plaxo probably should just let Ben Smith’s cogent (and brief) comment above speak for itself, the discussion here and elsewhere inspired me to do a follow up post.
(http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2006/05/hipcal_part_ii.html)
Hopefully, the post comes close on answering:
1)Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?
2)Why does this make business sense for Plaxo?
3)How can you compete with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in this area?
Looking forward to your thoughts
Nice to see Plaxo stand up for themselves, and HipCal.
I was a HipCal fan until day light savings time made it replicate all of my all-day events across two days and pushed everything two hours back in time. Then, two weeks later, as if by magic, when the HipCal problem still wasn’t fixed, gcal was released and, well, I haven’t been back since. That was a lot of commas.
This is a big disappointment. I loved HipCal. Note the past tense.
Plaxo bought HipCal for two reasons:
Pick up the customer base from HipCal, and eliminate a potential competitor as the market was forcing them to add a calendar feature anyway.
This was a good business development move, not a move to acquire technology, which, as has been said already, Plaxo could have created for themselves.
The users are more valuable than the code.
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