Another day, another Google acquisition rumor, and this one comes from within the borders of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. According to local press reports, Google may have acquired Ukrainian Portal Bigmir)net for $100 million.
Bigmir)net is a Ukrainian version of Mail.ru, a site Google is said to have be interested in last year (but missed out on) that ended up with a $1 billion valuation.
According to Quintura, Bigmir)net was launched in September 2000 with reported revenues of $15 million in 2006 and raised $11 million in a previous part IPO.
Yandex, the biggest search engine, is the real prize there.
http://www.yandex.com/
Not “zd`rravstvuite”(Russian!),but “zdorovenki buli”(Ukrainian).
Good time for Google to be more internationally cool…
I have to make sure by Googleing
Better call it “local press rumors”. Ohforf, they even have a question mark in the title.
Michael Arrington, Yandex is really big search engine, but that is russian portal, not ukranian. I believe that in few years raiting of Yandex will fall, cause they are using pay-to-top searching system. If some site want to register in Yandex search engine his owner have to pay to Yandex. Moreover, the more money owner will pay to Yandex, the topper place he will catch in serchings. Really honest, yeah?
Bigmir is really Ukrainian focus.
It doesn’t bring any foothold on Russian or other Russian speaking markets…
Yandex, mail.ru or rambler are the real players on both web & mobile.
they are trying to pass the desirable for reality, bigmir.net is a piece of crap filled in with ad, google will not be interested in it, I can bet
www. i – guide .ro
new updates
@ Micheal Arrington
Do a little research before saying anything about Yandex please.
See this traffic, it looks like Yandex is heading to Deadpool.
http://www.alex...ails/yandex.com
@ArMikael
“pay-to-top” is not necessarily bad in itself; it all depends on the search provider’s how to distribute the (paid) toppings.. ie., relevancy and frequency. The big players (ie., google, yahoo, baidu) all treat this as more art than science.
Can anyone tell me what is the revenue model of bigmir)net ?
If it is advertising then do they rely on CPM or CPC ?
They are earned $15 million in 2006. :O
Any details will be welcomed…
does anybody has a country-wise list of google’s acquisitions?
This is a listing of Google’s corporate acquisitions, including acquisitions of both companies and individual products.
Acquisition Date Company/Product Business Area Value (USD) References
2001
September 20, 2001 Deja’s Usenet archive Google Groups. undisclosed [1]
September 20, 2001 Outride, Inc. Spin-off from Xerox PARC. undisclosed [2]
2003
February, 2003 Pyra Labs Blogger. undisclosed [3]
April, 2003 Neotonic Software CRM technology. undisclosed [4]
April, 2003 Applied Semantics Advertising technology. $102 million [5]
September 30, 2003 Kaltix Search engine technology. undisclosed [6]
October, 2003 Sprinks Paid listings unit of Primedia. undisclosed [7]
October, 2003 Genius Labs Blogging undisclosed [8]
2004
May 10, 2004 Ignite Logic Website creation technology. undisclosed [9]
June 23, 2004 Baidu (2.6% stake) Chinese language search engine. All shares were sold in June, 2006[10][11] $5 million [12]
July 13, 2004 Picasa Photo management software. undisclosed [13]
October 27, 2004 Keyhole, Inc. Mapping software; used in Google Earth. undisclosed [14]
October 2004 Where2 Mapping software; used in Google Maps. undisclosed [15]
Sept.-Dec., 2004 ZipDash Used in Google Ride Finder. undisclosed [16]
2005
ca. 2005 2Web Technologies Web-based spreadsheet. undisclosed [17]
ca. 2005 Phatbits Widget engine. undisclosed
March 28, 2005 Urchin Software Corporation Web analysis. undisclosed [18]
May 12, 2005 Dodgeball Social networking. undisclosed [19]
July, 2005 Reqwireless Web browser and Mobile email. undisclosed [20]
July 7, 2005 Current Communications Group Broadband internet. $100 million (partial investment) [21]
August 17, 2005 Android (mobile phone platform) Software for Handheld devices. undisclosed [22]
November, 2005 Skia Graphics software. undisclosed [23]
November 17, 2005 Akwan Information Technologies Latin American internet operations. undisclosed [24]
December 20, 2005 AOL (5% stake) Internet. $1 billion [25]
2006
January 17, 2006 dMarc Broadcasting Radio advertising software and platform. $102 million [26]
February 14, 2006 Measure Map Blog analysis. undisclosed [27]
March 9, 2006 Upstartle Writely, online word processing. undisclosed [28]
March 14, 2006 @Last Software SketchUp, 3-D modeling. undisclosed [29]
April 9, 2006 Orion Advanced search method. undisclosed [30]
August 15, 2006 Neven Vision Computer vision undisclosed [31]
October 31, 2006 JotSpot Website applications undisclosed [32]
November, 2006 YouTube Video sharing (San Bruno, CA) $1.65 billion [33]
December, 2006 Endoxon Mapping solutions $28 million [34]
2007
January, 2007 Xunlei (partial acquisition) Network, file-sharing. undisclosed [35]
February, 2007 Adscape Video game advertising $23 million [36]
March, 2007 Trendalyzer Software undisclosed [37]
April, 2007 Tonic Systems Presentation software undisclosed [38]
April, 2007 Marratech video conferencing software Video conferencing (Stockholm, Sweden) undisclosed [39]
April 13, 2007 DoubleClick Online Advertising $3.1 billion [40]
May 11, 2007 GreenBorder Technologies Desktop enterprise security undisclosed [41]
June 1, 2007 Panoramio Geospatial Photo-sharing Service undisclosed [42]
June 3, 2007 FeedBurner RSS Feeds (Chicago, IL) $100 million [43]
June 5, 2007 PeakStream Parallel Processing undisclosed [44]
June, 2007 Zenter Presentations Software undisclosed [45]
July 2, 2007 GrandCentral VOIP Phone Aggregation (Fremont, CA) $45 million [46]
July, 2007 ImageAmerica High resolution aerial cameras undisclosed [47]
July 9, 2007 Postini Communications Security (San Carlos, CA) $625 million [48]
September, 2007 Tusli Google Blogger Api Engineering Team undisclosed [citation needed]
September, 2007 Zingku Mobile social network and communication platform undisclosed [49]
October, 2007 Jaiku An activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones (Helsinki) undisclosed [50]
Here’s Bigmir.net translated to English:
http://translat...ch%3Fq%3Dbigmir)net%26hl%3Den
@Michael and Ghaus –
It is Yandex.ru that is the Real prize. (Yandex is a search engine that is mostly used in the .RU zone, not in the .COM zone)
compare yandex.ru and yandex.com
http://www.alex...ails/yandex.com
“former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”
who uses references like that – it’s not like the SU disbanded last year. idiot.
Bigmir.net translated to English:
http://tinyurl.com/35g2v2
There is another hidden treasure on the Russian web which has traffic growing insanely fast. It is a russian version of classmates.com which currently has over 11million members and growing daily. It is a biggest social network on the russian market and you will see it mentioned in the press pretty soon.
http://www.odnoklassniki.ru
Check out their grows: http://www.alex...amp;size=Medium
“Zdrravstvuite” is in Russian.
In Ukrainian it’s “zdoroven’ki buly”
Being a Ukrainian myself, I think this rumor is a complete nonsense! Bigmir is a typical web 1.0 portal. It has no perspectives, no innovation and no talent behind it. The only thing it has is local brand recognition and a bit of traffic. As far as I know, Bigmir cannot even deal with local competition and is dying, slowly but steadily.. Google’s move into Ukraine seems logical, but Bigmir acquisition just doesn’t make sense. If it’s true, well… it’s a waste of $100 million!)
Yeah, so thats why they made the bigmir mail service use gmail services..
So, Google – Wellcome to Ukraine
Duncan, this news is really funny.
First.
These “rumors” started several months ago when Bigmir abandoned their own email service and transfered all users to Gmail on Bigmir.net domain. Some journalists in Ukraine never heard about Google Apps. So when they noticed that new interface of Bigmir mail resemble Gmail they made a “logical” conclusion – that’s may be an acquisition.
Second.
You are linking not to he site of “local press” but to the piece of shit. There are tons of sites like “Siteua.org” in Ukraine, which produce almost no their content but copypaste articles from each other and free sources.
But even in that “article” produced by teenage content creator for that news-splog no even a word about $100 mln or any other sum of money.
Duncan, where did you get those “$100 mln” and how do you check you stories? =)
Third.
Bigmir is leading portal in Ukraine and part of KP Media, one of the leading media holdings in Ukraine. The price of Bigmir is not more than $10 mln. It is content portal like Yahoo, but without own innovative technologies. That’s not the business of Google.
(Yes, I’m from Ukraine. And I was editor-in-chief of InternetUA magazine – print publication about online media).
Eh, what’s the killer app?
@14.
Thanks for the list of Google acquisitions.
Ukraine is a VERY BAD place for E-commerce. Wrong decision made here..
2Ilan: Google could be not really for e-commerce there rather for the advertising revenue. With 10-15 million Internet users it’s already a market.
to everybody: I checked out the original source — the article refers to information received by Bigmir insiders, and that’s all! At least, I didn’t find any numbers (such as $100 million) or more specific hints.
By the way, Bigmir switched its email platform to Google Apps last October, maybe this became fuel of speculations?
You are linking not to he site of “local press” but to the piece of shit. There are tons of sites like “Siteua.org” in Ukraine, which produce almost no their content but copypaste articles from each other and free sources.
@China.net, “pay-to-top” system is good untill payed links to sites is differs from sites that didn’t pay and user could understand where is adds, and where simple sites. But when all this things are going together with no differs it’s very not useful.
Why are people so in love with Google?
http://www.chai-yah.com
PERSAI OWNS YOU DUNCAN RILEY. IT WILL CONSUME YOUR SOULLLLL!!!
Yet more evidence that Duncan Riley will believe anything.
It’s almost not even worth making fun of him anymore.
ArMikael.
I wonder why you are writing about ‘pay-to-top’ principle for Yandex.
Any webmaster could register his site in Yandex for free, here http://webmaster.yandex.ru/.
Just a Bigmir.net dream.
Duncan – please change the Russian word to Ukrainian if you are serious about being an accurate blogger. Huge cultural mistake. Huge.
Yeah, not worth making fun of Duncan anymore. I almost feel sorry for the guy. Still I have to laugh: ha! I don’t speak Ukrainian nor Russian but I knew at a glance that he got the headline wrong. And I knew without even a glance that he got the story wrong.
Umm, the leading Ukranian Portal is Ukr.Net, even by BigMir’s own TOP Ratings service.
Hello everyone,
Reaching out to any/all talents or believers of Russian/Ukrainian ecommerce/portal global future to join our start up effort. We are in Chicago. Feel free to email min.vita@gmail.com