Details are just coming out, but New York based SonicMountain, a new startup, has acquired Evan Williams’ Odeo. The announcement will come sometime tomorrow. The price is not being disclosed but is in excess of $1 million, and the deal was all cash.
Odeo was publicly put on sale last February. The company was bought back from investors late last year.
Twitter is no longer part of Odeo, so this will not be included in the acquisition. Twitter and Odeo were both wholly owned subsidiaries of Obvious Corp.
Evan Williams will be working with SonicMountain as an advisor for six months or so.
Congratulations to Evan and his gang! Glad that they can focus more time on what they care about now.
Hopefully this turns out to be good news, I’ve never heard of SonicMountain.
Very interesting. Not much about SonicMountain on the web yet, but it looks like e-commerce is part of it so perhaps Odeo will have a direct path to monetization in its new home.
Digg this:
http://digg.com...y_SonicMountain
Wow that was kinda fast , Odeo was a big player on the web, 1 mil isn’t a lot, what’s he gon do with 1 mil lol. Double crossed IMO.
Gah forgot to say: They have an alexa of 9K… I guess this means that they done get about 25 000 uniques? Maybe 15 000 uniques per day. Oh well. Sad. hey BTW does someone know about the top addy, where it says Use Twitter… Is that self promotion? Is twitter the product of Odeo’s founder? If someone knows do tell, thanks.
Wow, nice sale on a failing website! Sorry to be harsh.
marc,
Odeo and Twitter were both founded by Evan Williams who also founded Blogger.
Congratulations to Evan on selling Odeo as it wasn’t going anywhere. Neither is Twitter for that matter. Once the hype settles down, he can sell it to another “stealth startup” for a million or go the Kiko/Y-Combinator route and sell it on eBay. Either way, not a great return (if any) given Evan & Co. bought back Odeo from the investors.
I guess this shows that no amount of TechCrunch coverage and echosphere love can turn a crappy business that solves no real problem into a valuable one.
Thanks Stephen. Doesnt blogger belong to google now? Also, for how much was blogger sold? Also, how is it a failing website if you make 1 mil off a site that sucks?
Odeo may have been the first profile that I read on Techcrunch back when this blog was just getting rolling…..time flies…..
I hate myself.
I follow a lot of tech/web 2.0 startups. Of everything that has been created in the past year+, Twitter is the ONLY site or app which has delivered for me something truly new, extremely useful, and valuable to me on a daily basis.
Since starting to use Twitter (when heading down to SXSW) I have:
- been made aware of dozens of events I would not have otherwise gotten to and thus had many enjoyable evenings
- reconnected with people when they were in town
- read at least one, usually many more stories i might not have otherwise seen (for example, I saw this post because of Michael’s twitter about it)
- followed up from other people’s twitters in ways that may lead to very real business opportunities for me
- made direct purchases as a result of twitters (from woot.com)
Twitter will, I think, not just survive but prosper. The value of twitter as a truly new one-to-many (who all chose to get these messages via the medium they chose – and in a highly flexible fashion – i.e. easily switching between my cell phone and desktop system, can chose to have them pushed to me – via IM or SMS, or pull them – via wap or html).
Exactly what Twitter’s business model will end up being? Not certain – they certainly are already generating a lot of revenues for carriers (I do think a revenue share model on sms traffic might be one option – perhaps combined with some filters so you can chose whose twitters get sent to you via sms – i.e. @yourname + some set of people)
As a medium for sending opt-in commercial messages which are time-sensitive twitter is also excellent. Woot.com is a perfect example of this – two messages a day (new product, when the product sells out) most days. I could well see choosing to subscribe to certain other types of commercial messages – early announcement of when tickets for an event/concert go on sale for example.
Twitter is also due to its multichannels of communication great for sending out alerts and some types of news. I probably should subscribe to the twitter of earthquake info in the bay area – for example. I could also easily see subscribing to a twitter of announcements about delays on a commuter rail if I took one on a regular basis.
It’ll be great to watch what the new owners do to improve features and add to the web site. Since Twitter has taken off, it’s seems like Odeo was just waiting for some TLC. It’s definitely a win for Evan and may be a win for SonicMountain, too, if they can find the right combination to build on what Odeo originally started. Good luck and keep us posted.
Coo. Never heard of Sonic Mountain before. Should be interesting to see if they do anything at all to it.
They have to make a certain amount of money to pay for all the bandwidth used by the huge amount of files hosted on Odeo.
Odeo’s bandwidth was provided for free by their investors. As far as I know, that luxury was not part of the deal.
I just hope it doesn’t cause any disruption to their users and they come up with some cool and innovative stuff.
Let’s see.
Does anyone have any info about SonicMountain?
The “Untitled Document” over at http://www.sonicmountain.com/ isn’t too informative…
What will they do next?
It looks like SonicMountain is focusing on “media search and delivery” and is probably an early start-up company based on the general landing page. Also, their address is in New York, so I’m guessing they are probably newcomers to the Web 2.0 scene, at least the one happening in Silicon Valley. Will have to check back when they announce more details. Regardless, it’s great news for Evan that Odeo (finally) has a new home.
I’m sure Evan must be pretty happy.
At least twitter is getting a lot more buzz than Odeo. I wonder if the proliferation of so many twitter addons is a good sign or points to a twitter bubble. Congrats to Evan and team.
http://ltips.bl...ttering-to.html
Odeo’s future lies in the brains, brawn and financial wizardry of Wall Street merged with the creative ad-sense of Madison Avenue. Confident that SonicMountain’s New York Management Team will ignite the global podcasting marketplace. That which was born in Silicon Valley will explode at lightning speed from East Coast operations to be a global technology trendsetter and the star player of podcasting aggregators. This could be the “acquisition of the year” for this sector.
@ Gabrielle – the sarcasm is wonderful. Haha that was awesome.
hmmm, Evan Williams paid $5M to buy the company back from his investors some time ago and now… he sold it out for just a $1M, does it make sense or it is a deal well cooked up with side negotiations … or do I miss something ?… otherwise congrats for the exit, anyway
Cheers
Web 2.0 Awards hit the same day SonicMountain closes acquisition.
Ranks Odeo #1. Timing is everything. Highly doubt there are any side deals. Just a sense that SonicMountain can take Odeo to the next level. As for exits, I wouldn’t view it as such. Simply put, “One Man’s Trash is another Man’s Treasure!
http://www.seom...rg/web2.0/short
Twitter sounds cool, but isn’t it overrated that a small widget can actually change anything? Come on, its just some craze that has some social element. When the dust settles, it will just be another Odeo.
SonicMountain really needs to rebrand or at least think of getting a new logo.
1 mil is a good price, even if the site is failing to make money now …
– Traffic
– back end system
– Brand …
– Rb
@ w2i – No you read it right. Evan is already in the hole $4 MM so he better make out well on Twitter. They should sell Twitter soon while the hype is hot and before everyone realizes that it’s a flash in the pan that no one outside of the 415 and 650 area codes cares about.
Jay: you forgot 408 and 510, ya hater. /me flashes some goofy-ass Web 2.isco sign. Subscribed.
@ Eric – people in 510 tend not to fall for the bufoonery as much and 408 types tend to be a bit more focused and less pie in the sky. Same for many 650ers. It’s the 415 crowd that really drives Twitter.
Yup, you nailed it. I am born and bred 408 (and some 650)… Also, free parking. But to note: some of the 650 types get starry eyed over the 415s, because that’s where the vee cee firms are.
Man, we need a powerpoint to wade through all this stuff, heh.
Congrats Ev and Obvious!
Mr. Arturo was VP of Sales at SiVault. SiVault has the same NYC address as Sonic Mountain. (are they really the same company???)
Here is a pretty thorough SEC filing about SiVault:
http://www.sec....4-06-016612.txt
Read for yourself.
The rise of Twitter.