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December 21, 2007

Edgeio Assets Acquired By LookSmart

Michael Arrington

35 comments »

The auction of Edgeio’s assets is complete, and Looksmart is the winning bidder. They’ve acquired most of the assets of the company for $280,000.

I spoke to Patrick Chapman, LookSmart’s director of corporate development, briefly after the auction closed this morning. He says its too early to say what they’ll do with the assets, but they’ll likely issue a press release sometime soon. Chapman says he’ll be talking to Edgeio’s former employees and will hopefully offer some or all of them jobs with LookSmart.

LookSmart is a small public company with a market cap of around $68 million. They’ve made some recent moves to build the business back to what it was in the 90’s, including a recent share repurchase announcement.

This marks the end of this stage of Edgeio, a company I co-founded with Keith Teare in 2005 and which we put into the deadpool earlier this month. But I am happy to see the assets move to a company with the resources to move the ideas forward.

Edgeio
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This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. No Surprise

    December 21st, 2007 at 11:50 am

    Mike,

    Hopefully you’ve gotten some money back on your initial investment.

    Congrats on some success given the circumstances. :-)

  2. Mike

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm

    I’m guessing LookSmart will bundle this in some way with AdCenter. They’ll find a way to make this attractive to existing publisher clients.

    Maybe it just needed a home with some scale……

    Cheers to LookSmart for extending courtesy to the Edgeio employees!

  3. bob

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    hopefully they are reading this and they somehow tie it into a wordpress plugin/add-on like I suggested to Edgeio when they were running. There isnt a single wordpress plugin out there that does this, and would be very successful.

  4. Alan Wilensky

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    That is an interesting acquisition; a former great in the rebound process taking firesale cutting edge assets into its re-tooling portfolio.

    Now, can it make those assets perform -that’s the nut.

  5. Sam Francisco

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    When and where is all the furniture and hardware going for sale?

  6. Jacob

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    congrat! Now we probably get 10 more edgo posts in the future - part of the deal. It nice you make nice with new people - yet you bury others with no mercy. You say Duncan shouldnt post on the auction - you is ok to post on auction?

  7. a friend of your daughter

    December 21st, 2007 at 12:42 pm

    Michael, would you hope edgeio would do better than the time it is with you ? or you hope it fail so it proves that you aren’t that suck?

  8. SEO Mash

    December 21st, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    What about the auction for Adaptive Real Estate?

  9. Chameleon Headsets

    December 21st, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    I agree with bob, above:

    A wordpress plugin would be a great move towrd turning it into a cutting-edge product suite.

    Bill Burke
    http://www.phoneportals.com/index.asp
    Your audio content, live streams -
    Now available to any mobile phone

  10. David Armstrong

    December 21st, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    I’m not sure to be happy or worried when your competition calls it quits. How much money did they raise for a 280K exit?

  11. Robin Wauters

    December 21st, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Well that should shut up all the people pointing to the fact that there was no bid on the public auction page so far. Good that someone picked up the assets, because the general idea was sound enough. Look forward to seeing what the future will bring for these types of websites.

  12. Joel Cheesman

    December 21st, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    There are a lot of similar businesses who can’t be too optimistic about the final bid amount. Hard to believe a company that raised $5 million - and was attached to Arrington - could go for such a meager sum.

  13. teddy

    December 21st, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    Looksmart, huh? Blind leading the blind…

  14. JasonMcIntyre

    December 21st, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    Its hard to see Looksmart ever regaining ground from the heyday.

    The have tried to reinvent themselves 3 or 4 times now.

  15. Ballmer

    December 21st, 2007 at 3:17 pm

    Some old comodore computers and office furniture!

    lol
    fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  16. loren nason

    December 21st, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    What about ARES????

  17. drew

    December 21st, 2007 at 3:52 pm

    here the wordpress plugin for edgeio. http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....assifieds/
    too bad i finished it 1 day before we went bust :(
    its not even made to svn yet, so technically guys from looksmart need it.. drop me a line for details.

  18. LookMartti

    December 21st, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    Looksmart looked like they were going somewhere with a money making idea when they started FindArticles.

    CNet bought FindArticles from LookSmart for $20.5 million not too long ago, and after that, I don’t they have any real traction or real sense of direction as of now, public company or not.

  19. biggie

    December 21st, 2007 at 4:36 pm

    I love the new media. You get to report on yourself. Is this news? Yawn.

  20. David Mackey

    December 21st, 2007 at 6:21 pm

    Wow. Looksmart is still around? Didn’t everything they ran die off? What are they doing these days?

  21. elegance

    December 22nd, 2007 at 12:22 am

    Oh what next Looksmart goes into dead pool?

    Is TC going to advertise the assets of all future companies that enter the dead pool? Inc Looksmart?

    Nice sale btw. 6 million investment = 280K return. Now that’s what I call a good business investment.

  22. Keith Teare

    December 22nd, 2007 at 4:22 am

    A couple of people have asked about the ARES sale.

    The reserve on ARES was $150,000. Despite a lot of interest in the assets nobody bid the reserve. As a result there was no buyer.

    In discussions today we have decided to re-auction the ARES assets, but with no reserve. The auction will run through next Wednesday.

    Keith Teare
    ceo/edgeio

  23. Josh

    December 22nd, 2007 at 4:46 am

    I spent some time going through the Edgeio documentation. For the life of me I do not understand why they decided to shut the company down. Costs could easily have been trimmed to several grand a month or even less. Downsizing the operation and bootstrapping it from then on would have been the way to protect your investment.

  24. Deal-maker Strategies

    December 22nd, 2007 at 11:14 am

    Wow, talk about a name from the last millenium! I didn’t even know Looksmart was still in business.

  25. iwantaiphone

    December 22nd, 2007 at 2:54 pm

    @ keith

    You find time to come on here and post comments but your own blog hasnt been updated since sept 7, what gives. CEO lmao.

  26. Clyde Smith

    December 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 am

    That’s a positive turn of events in many ways. I’m glad to see that.

  27. Keith Teare

    December 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 am

    @iwantaiphone

    There is more of a conversation here than on my blog. This seems a more effective way to communicate.

  28. Keith Teare

    December 23rd, 2007 at 12:43 am

    @Josh

    Couldn’t agree more. But our primary investor was not willing to see beyond the end of January and so your approach would not have been viable. I continue to believe edgeio is focused on a huge opportunity that can be delivered relatively inexpensively.

    At some point soon I will tell the whole story.

    Keith Teare
    ceo/edgeio

  29. Mike

    December 23rd, 2007 at 6:36 am

    “I didn’t even know Looksmart was still in business.”

    55 mil. in the bank, no debt, powers many high profile website PPC platforms like ASK.com.
    They will be powering the ad platform for Wikia.
    Not dead by a long shot.

  30. Willem

    December 24th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    I am happy for the founders and Keith, good luck with the next phase

  31. Anon

    January 4th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    They ARE powering Wikia’s ad platform.

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