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.
Mike,
Hopefully you’ve gotten some money back on your initial investment.
Congrats on some success given the circumstances.
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!
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.
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.
When and where is all the furniture and hardware going for sale?
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?
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?
What about the auction for Adaptive Real Estate?
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
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?
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.
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.
Looksmart, huh? Blind leading the blind…
Its hard to see Looksmart ever regaining ground from the heyday.
The have tried to reinvent themselves 3 or 4 times now.
Some old comodore computers and office furniture!
lol
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
What about ARES????
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.
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.
I love the new media. You get to report on yourself. Is this news? Yawn.
Wow. Looksmart is still around? Didn’t everything they ran die off? What are they doing these days?
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.
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
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.
Wow, talk about a name from the last millenium! I didn’t even know Looksmart was still in business.
@ 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.
That’s a positive turn of events in many ways. I’m glad to see that.
@iwantaiphone
There is more of a conversation here than on my blog. This seems a more effective way to communicate.
@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
“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.
I am happy for the founders and Keith, good luck with the next phase
They ARE powering Wikia’s ad platform.