Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that originally launched in Germany in late 2005, has been acquired by Los Angeles based Live Universe, sources tell us. The deal has not yet been announced, and both Live Universe and Pageflakes refuse to comment.
Pageflakes raised a high profile round of funding in May 2006 from Benchmark Europe (renamed Balderton Capital). Balderton has continued to bridge the company with additional funds, and about $4 million has been invested to date.
Live Universe, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, has made a number of acquisitions to spur growth. Most recently, they acquired video site Revver, in February 2008. The also run the video site LiveVideo.com.
The deal was competitive, according to one source, who says that Colorado-based NewsGator was also bidding. But it’s likely that the acquisition price was not huge – Pageflakes is in a highly competitive market dominated by Yahoo and Google. Even so, reports that the company may be going to the deadpool seem to be inaccurate.
Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, who ran the My Yahoo product prior to joining Pageflakes, will report to Greenspan, and the company will remain at their current offices in Germany and San Francisco.
should be a timely exit, especially for Balderon..
Nice service, well deserving.. congrats!
What is the ultimate plan for LiveUniverse?
To make the MySpace analogy, are they planning to acquire and become a complete destination for the creation of multimedia homepages and blogs.
There must be a master plan to this.
Perhaps TechCrunch can do an interview with him regarding the early creation of MySpace and his reactions while witnessing the astounding growth.
It is a one in a million experience only a few will ever know
hope it will add something new
bloggersmosaic.com
An interesting choice for an Acquisition. You aren’t kidding when you say a competitive market, lets not forget netvibes.
We need a picture of Brad Greenspan dressed as santa claus, he certainly brings cheer to startups in need
Page Flakes has always wanted to do more marketing, but always said they didn’t have the resources to fund marketing. Interesting that they are with Live Universe now. Perhaps that will make them stand out more.
I’m keeping my eye on http://livevideo.com because not only do they have a good brand, but they are the most popular platform out there that focuses on live video. It will be interesting to see the further relationships develop between all the Live Universe departments.
nothing can beat netvibes (in terms of traffic)
Pageflakes has always been my favorite landing page site- I use it to organize my RSS feeds. Based on the amount of money they raised vs. burn rate, I wonder if this was a fire sale. Given their low market share, I don’t know if the path to profitability was anywhere within site. It’s great to know that the service will stay up and running either way.
I think Netvibes will face strong competition…after this acquisition.
looks like a good move
Pageflakes is a great product; better than Netvibes in my view. If this story is true, I just hope it will put them in a position to take it forward successfully.
Buying your way into these markets is the best way forward, I see a lot more of these swallow ups happening this year.
Congrats to the PageFlakes guys (I think). I’m just perplexed as to why such a business would have a high burn rate.
Yeah!!! Good.
Looks like there aren’t many non-acquired start pages left – is it just Netvibes and Protopage now?
Hi Dave,
There are still a few around, shamelessly I’ll bring up Odysen for one, http://www.odysen.com.
Key differentiator being free-formatting widgets, allowing users to re-size the widget to whatever they feel is most appropriate/efficient. Lots of page examples and feature updates at the blog at http://odysen.blogspot.com.
We’re very small, have not received funding to date, hence have ridiculously low burn-rate, set up to be basically be around as long long as we feel like it, ie as long as we consider it useful enough for using it ourselves to spend the time on evenings/weekends moving it forward.
This is good news – Pageflakes is an excellent product and if this gives it more stability then that’s all for the best.
Holy christ, another phil bradley – i just did a double take
this virtual town ain’t big enough for the both of us!
comment @42 penned by “stone” on this thread is Brad Greenspan in disguise
http://www.tech...s-age/#comments
Brad, should you be reading, I am going to send you a BPlan on our jobs site soon.
@ Arrington,
http://www.tech...thieves-caught/
Here you say:
“It’s funny how few people understand how easy it is to track activity via IP address. For example, the startup CEOs who leave comments here under their real name, and then suddenly go trolling under an anonymous name, all under the same IP.”
Could you look up “stone”(Brad Greenspan)’s ip in comment @42 and let us know what other comments he made? You didn’t sign an NDA or anything. I’m curious. If not I understand. It would be insightful though if you could start doing that.
I loved Netvibes, but when it went through it’s period of being too slow to use, I jumped ship and began working on my own. It’s nowhere near as full featured as those with tons of money and devs, but I do have full control over it.
Feel free to check it out – http://www.MyOwnSite.us
I too have found PageFlakes fun to use. May this acquisition keep it growing and advancing!
This is awesome news not only for PageFlakes but for other startups that have great products/services. They’ve done a great job with grassroots marketing…now we can see what they do with some money. I fire up PageFlakes every morning when I wake up to read my preferred news blurbs…so much easier than other surfing site after site. It inspires me to get my other projects going now.
I absolutely LOVE pageflakes, I also use it as my homepage and RSS reader.
Congrats to them!
Prescient move: The pageflakes team deserves a lot of credit for the foresight to make this happen inside of a deepening recession. They have a strong story to tell. Their offering is superior to anything else I have tried.
Widgets man……whoda’ thunk?
Pageflakes is a great service. I hope brad doesn’t screw it up.
Looks like the GigaOM story was sour grapes from NewsGator:
http://gigaom.c...#comment-871136
…nice move from NewsGator…what scumbags…I guess without Pageflakes they will have to find a new way to save themselves from irrelevance.
Good move, Pageflakes…sounds like you picked the better partner!
“live universe gets 55 million visitors a month”
???
no, you’re not supposed to count the perl scripts and google crawler kids
To add one more competitor to an already competitive market, there’s also ClutterMe.com. A cross between iGoogle and MySpace launched in October 2007.
pageflakes it’S not worth the money … unbelievable.
i just added the post to http://www.tectrnd.com
cheers
vincent
Netvibes’ much better!
I’m a little confused.. everyone is talking about how they do not have marketing… But for a long time i have seen a PageFlakes Ad on Techcrunch. I’m cursious what other marketing they did? What was their burn rate? They said prior to more funding they had enough to last another 6 years.
Anyways… Congrats to PageFlakes.
To all those Netvibes cheerleaders I’d like to add the possibility that their current engineering difficulties stand to cause them to crater a la Friendster.
Adding to #16: popurls.com has not yet been acquired, but I think it’s a different category of startpages.
I don’t understand what is good about getting acquired by a company desperate to gain more traffic in the hope of keeping livevideo on the video hosting radar, because in the end that’s all that matters for Greenspan: drive traffic to LV.
Revver: plugin could be interesting considered LV has an API.
Pageflakes: compulsory LV video of the day?
Maybe the LU can recode some of their myspace blinky sites to offer blinky widgets for PF now.
@Sarah Meyers
How does livevideo have a “good” brand? Teen sexuality I guess is your measure?
come on sarah..
Pageflakes has and continues to do great work. They led the way with shared start pages, which continues to be the reason I use it. I will be interested to see how LiveVideo will integrate their service.
@Jonathan,
out of previous contacts (as possible site manager for one of their properties) I do know that LU wants to keep sites independent, but use them to drive traffic to LV. They aren’t looking to integrate any properties in to LV, but want to use them and hopefully build LV as one of the main (brands) properties in the videosharing market.
Wow a lot of positive praise for PageFlakes here! Haven’t seen this much praise on the comment walls in a while it’s almost like LU had everyone comment here – where have I seen that before?
http://valleywa...gineers-leaving
Oh yeah, that’s it.
Yep, that’s the LiveUniverse credo. Create a ton of fake comments on whatever news story that gets published about their latest desperate attempts to get attention. They’re like the Bai Ling of the Internet industry…absolutely no talent so they have to stoop to the lowest level to get some sort of story, then they flood the story with clearly fake comments posted by their own employees. It’s actually kind of funny and I look forward to seeing stories involving LiveUnivsere just because of this.
@#38, That’s what everyone said about youtube in 06. Now Destiny’s Child and Disney stars are creating their own channels generating millions of views and building a more sustainable business model.
Just you wait.
This is awesome news… Kudos to LiveUniverse!
It’s wonderful to see PageFlakes going through another success milestone to stay competitive in a very competitive market.
Sarah Meyers is smart. Way to go PageFlakes!
Dude, you totally work for LiveUniverse, name is Jeremy. Check out his profile on livevideo, not that anyone cares about that place. He’s the “community manager” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. I guess he coordinates the community of incoming porn traffic they pump into that joke of a site. This is so typical of that sinking ship that goes by the name of S.S. LiveUniverse. I hope you don’t go down with the crazy Capt. Greenspan!
#41, I guess you and the rest of your pals at Netvibes have nothing better to do.
Who knows the money involved but at least they were acquired. I give them a lot of credit. The product is easy to use. How to monetize it? I don’t know but it is easy to use.