After a previous flirtation with Fox Interactive that ended abrubtly, Toronto-based BubbleShare finally found a buyer who’ll love them forever.
Today they announced their acquisition by Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.
This marks 28 year old founder Albert Lai’s second entrepreneurial success. He was a millionaire before his 20th birthday after founding MyDesktopNetwork and selling it in 1999. He dabbled in a few other startups before BubbleShare, and has now made another mini-fortune. Congrats to the entire team.
Our previous coverage of BubbleShare is here.
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Seems quite a cheap price for a cool photo sharing site.
Maybe being in Canada rather than in the valley lowered the interest, and the price as well.
This seems like a good buy, especially with FOX hot on their trail a few weeks ago. I was on flickr last night and was struck by the fact that so little has changed with the service over the past year. With companies like BubbleShare and others rolling out a ton of new features and adapting their service for use on the top social sites, it is remarkable that flikr has done so little. With out much effort, I think flickr could have rolled out similar features as slide/bubbleshare/photobucket and been the run away winner in this broad space.
In your last post, you wrote about Yahoo’s declining lead vs.Google in the calendar wars. With so many upstarts in the photosharing space and so few new features on Flickr we may see a similar scenario play out in photo sharing.
It is kind of baffling, but getting acquired by Yahoo may significantly hamper a young company on the innovation front. It seems like many acquisitions just languish while the high profile buy inspires many startups to keep innovating and improving.
Nice to see a canuck get a win! Congrats and continued success to all at bubbleshare!
Good show Bubbleshare! Take some time off, you deserve it!
Strange how our reactions differ. Unlike MistOne, I’ve always thought highly of flickr for NOT releasing what their competitors tout as whizbang features which I think adds very little, if any, to the core experience of sharing photos.
Congrats to Albert,
Seems like a good fit, they are getting bright people to take their fast growing family media company to the future. They can also use some simplicity and modern feel to their portals.
Cool that you are staying in Canada too.
Not bad for a beta…
Congrats Albert et al.
Congratulations Albert! That’s inspiring!
*5 - a quick response -
I really like flickr and don’t use any of the other services nearly as much as I use flickr, just surprised how little innovation and enhancement they have been doing in relation to the competition.
#10, when you’re Miss America, you don’t need to get a nose job.
Good stuff, again…for a beta. Have they been in Beta since 2004? If so, wtf?
millionaire before he was twenty he’s been living the good life.
There is a similiar web site offering bubbles http://www.vamos.com
I don’t understand how this is possible. As far as I can tell, the site doesn’t make money, but simply pays money to allow anyone to put photos online… And a company buys it for 2.25 million. If someone can explain to me how this site is worth all of this money (or direct me to an article), it would be greatly appreciated.
Gannon i guess it is worth the price someone is ready to pay if he sees value in it.
What I want to know is why they see value in it. It’s just a Web site where users post photo albums? No fees, no advertisements, no income whatsoever unless I am missing something. Anyone could make a site like this, wait until there’s a bunch of content from users, and then receive $2.25 million? It wouldn’t cost nearly that simply to pay a few people to make such a site. The reason why I am wondering is because I would love to do the same thing (be set for life off of making some user content site), but don’t really understand what they are paying for here — why it’s worth anything at all (that would help, haha).
Congratulations to Bubbleshare! It’s interesting, almost a year ago I presented Simpy at the Under the Radar conference, in the same session as Browster, and maybe even the same session as Bubbleshare. Bubbleshare got sold, and Browster is no more.
Perhaps you should flag that link as NSFW? There’s currently a thumbnail of a proudly erect penis in their ironically titled “Fresh From the Community” section of the home page. GG to Bubbleshare (BS?) on moderating their content.
A small nitpick - Albert wasn’t a founder of My Desktop, but was involved when it was sold.
Tried http://www.vamos.com. Wow, that’s hot! All bubble strips should be done that way.
http://www.vamos.com I meant.