Corporate social networking application Visible Path is set for an acquisition soon. The term sheet has been signed and the acquirer, says the company, is a “multi-billion dollar international company with established sales and technology operations.” No word on the terms of the deal, but a worthwhile exit price would be high considering the $22.7 million already invested in the firm.
Visible Path differs from other business social networks like LinkedIn or Xing, by creating your social network out of your email inbox. The service is based on an Outlook plug-in that impressed us earlier because your connections are based on the frequency of your real interactions and not random friending or pokes. These relationships are mapped online and make up a directory of people you can search through by skill or relationship. It’s a useful feature that I imagine a service like the “email utility” Xobni implementing.
Visible Path never saw as great a level of adoption as LinkedIn, which launched around the same time and has effectively cinched the U.S. corporate social networking scene. Maybe their new partner will give them some much needed exposure.
Wow, that’s just spectacular. I’ve blogged about social networking before. You know…. like on my blog. Great post!
Oracle?
Hoover’s?
e-mail?
IBM?
Salesforce.com?
Webex/Cisco/Intel (suitetwo)?
Oracle?
Wow, I haven’t heard about these guys since I worked at Spoke. I’m pretty interested to see who the “multi-billion dollar international company” is…
-Arin
And Nick is probably the only one who was really really REALLY impressed with Visible Path.
Venturebeat is reporting it is Pringo Networks.
Hello Authors, looks like your DATEs on your systems are different. Because, some of the topics are being posted underneath the ones that were already posted. That means, if I see Article-A now and after some time when we visit the page, Article-A is still on the top, but there is another one (Article-B) getting appeared underneath Article-A which was NOT present earlier.
@Bob - Some of the older articles could have been made sticky or featured making them appear at the top always until the sticky option is disabled for them.
Visible Path was always a acquisition target in my opinion. they have operations in India also. I had met them once here.
Good luck to them.
It must be microsoft as this would be a great feature to have built into outlook as they will be trying to get some cool bling for their desktop applications which still form their biggest chunk of revenues
Reuters, Reed Elsevier ??? they leak an acquisition based upon a term sheet? the term sheet must have a quick expiration, to me sounds like Reed. but I know nothing!!!