We’re still looking to confirm, but alarm:clock says they’ve learned that web widget provider JS-Kit has agreed to acquire conversation tracking service coComment.
Update: looks like alarm:clock jumped the shark gun on this one. coComment CEO Matt Colebourne got back to our e-mail and says rumors about an acquisition are false, and that there will be an announcement about a partnership or some other kind of collaboration between the two startups soon. JS-Kit’s Chris Saad (who is also co-founder of DataPortability and Media 2.0 Workgroup) checked in as well to say there will be an announcement soon, yet declines to share details.
Update 2 with details of the announcement made:
Henceforth, coComment will automatically track comments from all sites enabled with JS-Kit Commenting, on a fully opt-in/out basis, so brand owners can easily follow consumer opinions on more than 600,000 sites. coComment will now offer JS-Kit commenting (and Rating, Reviews and Polls) to sites. coComment and JS-Kit confirmed that all existing users of coComment’s Site Comments engine will continue to be fully supported and will not be inconvenienced.
JS-Kit raised a total of $4.8 million in two rounds, the Series B for $3.6 million dating back less than a month. coComment was backed by even more venture capital: it had raised a total of $5.6 million from Swisscom and the Japanese Netage Capital Partners. This leads us to believe coComment simply ran out of money and chose to merge with a company offering a similar service rather than dying. Alarm:clock adds that coComment’s US employees (their headquarters are in Switzerland) are being offered jobs at JS-Kit or unceremonously fired.
coComment is a service that essentially lets people keep track of all their separate comments and discussions across the web, notifying users of newly posted comments while displaying any comments and conversations that a user may be tracking on sites such as blogs, news, photo sharing, and social bookmarking sites.
JS-Kit’s widget library already includes a commenting system, as well as ratings, polls and reviews, all of which can be embedded on a web page with a short snippet of code. Over the summer, JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, another commenting system, to improve its global profiles and better integrate with blog platforms.
Hence the title of consolidation in the online conversation world. You may remember SezWho acquired a contextual analysis startup called Tejit last May, and Automattic (the company behind WordPress) also made two acquisitions in this space after last summer: Intense Debate and Polldaddy.
I expect to see a TON of these early stage mergers over the next 6-18 months …the window is closed. Partner, be acquired or die.
VC’s will be the catalysts: http://bit.ly/2UTmAW
http://www.twitter.com/A_F
Interesting to see such mergers in current economic downturn.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
@phenom, my thoughts exactly. Do we have further details as to where the end user benefits from the arrangement?
what/who is this alarm:clock?
yea what gives?
i have found great peace with backtype.com, how much better can this comment tracking get?
ConversationLocator.com
Cocomment is interesting – I even joined… and hopefully I’ll be able to track this comment.
More mergers seem likely in the economic downturn. It makes sense as VC and credit-based capital to build is scarce… but if you are an existing company with some cash looking at a startup company with no cash – but a good start, good ideas, and that can provide good synergy… that is a merger/buyout just waiting to happen.
an option to cocomment is commentino. A smart client that enables you to immidiately publish comments from any site with Tags and other rules, and a web site in which you can discover the comments of others (I am a co-founder at commentino).
my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim
Its not just retailers selling cheap. Rough economy makes for highly discounted buying of companies. Its a great time to buy if you got cash. F stock options.
All these little startups with no viable biz models will start merging and hoping they outlast the drought. In the end, unless they find a way to charge, they’ll be gone.
These comment aggregation startups like Disqus and coComment are all going to die out unless they’re bought and bought soon.
Hmm, first intensedebate gets acquired by wordpress. Now coComment in the JS-Kit portfolio. Can’t help but wonder what will become of Disqus after they burn through their capital.
The comment startups that will survive (without being bought) are those that have:
- a good business model
- know how to develop strategic partnerships
- understand the importance of virality
- provide a good service with an easy user interface
moderated comments suck
word press and varnish cache sucks
seems like a pretty good fit to me, but I agree that some moderated comments are a pain.
Jesse W.
http://www.subprimeblogger.com
Jesse, it wasn’t the moderated comments. Arrington’s crew installed varnish,.a reverse proxy.
Do you know where I’m posyting this from?
I’m actually mobile right now on my g1 google phone at a socialite LA tech party. Open bar, music and everything. I don’t darw post pics here LOL.
Life in California rocks. I almost feel like Scoblish right now, soaking up fhat ree party stuff from the tech industry. LOL, That and cheap gas. Cali is the best place on earth.
I’m all thumbs on this G1 keypad, sorry about the typos
Damn, Arrington did censor the comments. Wow, he’s a FCC wanna be
Everybody wants to survive in this bad economy, acquisition are more rampant & more to come nichea.info
I like coComments but if WordPress or other blogging platform can make comment follow-ups a default option that would be great than to sign-up for one another service.
The problem with tracking conversation is not just the feature in the blog platform (many sites have RSS feeds or email for comment notifications), but more that you still need to aggregate in a simple way all the notifications you register to.
What would you think of having to subscribe to all RSS feeds of the conversations you want to track, or, even worse, to receive an email each time one of those is updated ?
This is why I think having an external service to centralize all the conversations you track is still a very good option.
Why did you use “jump the shark” instead of “jump the gun”?
“Jump the shark” means a certain thing and is completely wrong in this context, unless you mean to imply that alarm:clock is past its prime and can’t be trusted any more.
Maybe you were trying to vary your language in an interesting, fresh, snarky way, but you just managed to make things more confusing.
I blame the fact that I’m not a native English speaker. Corrected the post, thanks.
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