Construktiv, the company behind social bookmarking service Mister Wong and Lifestream.fm, has acquired FreundeNews, a German service blatantly modeled and designed after the example of FriendFeed (the startup was actually called FreundeFeed when it first launched in April 2008 but changed its name sometime after, most probably in fear of sparking a trademark dispute).
Let’s hope this isn’t an encouragement to copy/paste innovation, althought Construktiv is most likely simply doing this to clear the path for their lifestreaming service Lifestream.fm to become the only relevant one in Germany. Although the deal terms remain undisclosed, we believe that it was rather small in size; we’re told FreundeNews usage was relatively low in the country and the founders were keen on pursuing other ventures.
The users that did engage with the web service have 4 weeks to transition to Lifestream.fm, starting today.
(Hat tip to Netzwertig)
Amazing. It gives hope to those of us webpreneurs out here who have similar dreams.
While not as exciting from technological or entrepreneurial point of view, I don’t think anything is wrong with the local clones of all kinds.
Those guys just try to be the best in some local environment and copy as many lessons from abroad as possible (sometimes even design, which can become fishy). Healthy kind of copying is part of every healthy ecosystem.
In Slovenia we had a relatively successful local search engine (najdi.si). It was localized before google and it still has substantial market share. It’s delivering a service some people in certain area want. And that’s enough sometimes.
It is nice if you can create both technological and business innovation and be next Google. But if you can’t, delivering some kind of valuable service to people that appreciate it is great too.
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
agreed.
I have no problem with legal clones…
Google’s PPC was a “clone” of goto.com / overture.com / yahoo.com and actually had to settle the IP litigation with yahoo
Facebook could be called a “clone” of friendster — which itself could be called a “clone” of sixdegrees from waaaaaay back.
Nice.
Good stuff!
Copy, Paste, (modify), Get Acquired: Six Apart Buys Pownce
This was an estimated €500 deal – not worth writing about.
I’m sorry, I tried to locate the delete button but couldn’t find it. Better luck next time.
there are so many more important tech news from Germany than this. who picks these stories? a ‘constructiv’ employee?
We have trained a monkey to do it for us, the poor animal works 24/7.
I think FreundeNews was a legitimate copy of friendfeed located in Germany. Good idea as long as Livestream.fm hasn’t been started. Mr. Wong thought the same this time.
Well just for flaming issues: news aggregation sucks anyway. Nobody needs that. Bloody soul nudism.