People search engine Spock is about to be sold, say multiple sources. Spock was a hot startup back when it launched in 2007, but after an initial spike in traffic, the company has gone sideways and faded into obscurity. People search, it seems, will be dominated by the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, who are both now being smart about search engine optimization.
Now they’ve burned through much of the cash they raised, which includes an announced $7 million round plus additional undisclosed funding. And they’ve been trying to sell themselves for some time – we’ve confirmed with a couple of buyers who looked at it and passed. Meanwhile, Spock has started charging users to access their data.
But one company may have bitten and are close to buying the company. Sources are saying that the infamous Intelius (founded by the equally infamous Naveen Jain), a people search engine that charges users to access data, may be buying Spocksoon. If these rumors are accurate, God help Spock. Not only is Intelius embroiled in all kinds of legal and ethical disputes, but they also have a shaky history when it comes to acquisitions. See this article, for example, about a 2005 acquisition of addresses.com, which ended up in litigation. Our coverage of Intelius is here and here.
Selling to Intelius is just one step less painful than shutting down the company outright, so things must be worse at Spock than we’ve heard. Note that we’ve only been able to absolutely confirm that the two companies have had recent meetings about an acquisition, we’re still looking for a sale confirmation.
what kind of information or technology could “spooksoon” have that intellus does not already have.
ProfileLocator.com – identify yourself
nice mention of spocksoon ..lol
I saw them play frisbee in the Valley one time. Crazy smart guys working at Spock…
Where’s Captain kirk? LOL
yawn… Mike you’ve seriously got to get a hobby…
Joemama, you don’t even care about your own privacy? You’re an idiot!
The “service” that Intelius provides is nothing short of Orwellian. Naveen Jain should go to jail.
don’t do it Spock. life’s too short.
“People search, it seems, will be dominated by the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, who are both now being smart about search engine optimization”
With over 200M people in our database and ridiculous success with our SEO efforts, I’m surprised that WhitePages isn’t mentioned as a potential ‘dominator’ of People Search.
Sad to see Spock meeting its end. Smart folks down there who will no doubt make waves in the future.
you left out the part where people don’t use whitepages. seo only counts for search results and 200MM sounds a little to me like you lose on the “opt-in” factor that FB and LI have going for them. frankly, i put whitepages in the “nabble” bucket of meaningless search cruft and therefore plainly look right past them/you.
people don’t really find the whitepages.com site very credible. Whenever I accidentally land on it I jump off as soon as humanly possible.
white pages is alright
but it’s like one big giant ad for premium services, which is somewhat understandable
now, when do we get to delete our own data from these services?
They should sell if they can’t sustain the business financially of course. I liked spock, but it seemed just a little dull. There was no difference in reading Donald Trump on spock than on wikipedia. Wikipedia was more personal and up-to-date.
hmm – dont you think you should change your spock traffic spike to be a bit more accurate? it’s seem to be really bad reporting on your part techcrunch.
take a look at alexa.
http://alexa.co....com+kosmix.com
spock has more traffic then a9, cuil, kosmix, and powerset combined!
really poor for techcrunch to show “google searches” for the term spock as opposed to traffic metrics like comscore or alexa. looks like you are trying to mislead users to believe something to not be true.
Might want to check this graph out too. Alexa is notoriously bad with traffic analytics. Compete is anecdotally known to be a lot better.
http://siteanal...x.com+cuil.com/
This data is corroborated on QuantCast as well. http://www.quan...t.com/spock.com
We provide include: North America (NAFTA), South American countries, the EU 27 countries, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Russia and other 248 countries and regions in a variety of Customs bill of lading data, import and export trade (Statistics) data. http://www.customs-data.com.cn
Competitive Intelligence Global Trade System (GT) data contains a large number of buyers and sellers information such as number of transactions prices, both absolute quality so far on any channel (for example, B2B, event, etc.) suppliers and buyers to study the information and products in the the positioning of the global market to provide authoritative and accurate data and reports!
http://www.cust...n/GOOD-HOPE-LA/
Hey Mike, do you have any personal stake in WhitePages.com? If you do, wouldn’t it be good journalism to disclose it? Either way, you have written more negative articles about their competitors than you have against just about any other company…
Actually, I dont think people search will be dominated by Facebook and LinkedIn. Both of these sites are limited by those who choose to use their service. This leaves out oh only say about 6 billion people. I think the real people search engine is Google. Google recently allowed its users to not only create a profile page but to link to their online profiles, thus letting google consolidate public profiles to single identities. http://www.wire...oogle-wants-yo/
too funny, intelispock, hope spock team knows what will happen next
this is turning into infospace II (ask go2net how deals go with naveen)
type “dot con job” in google for a great story about naveen and his business tactics
When is the world going to be rid of the scammers at Inelius. Just how much can they get away with. How do they do it. How can they live with themselves.
I think as you rightly said, this acquisition raises some key points about Web 2.0 itself and the privacy implications of Web 2.0. A longish blog:
Harnessing Digital footprints: The dark side of Web 2.0 – 01 May 2009 was the day I lost faith in Web 2.0(hopefully we don’t make the same mistakes with Mobile Web 2.0 and respect privacy) http://opengard...ssing_digi.html
Hmm – spock is able to be bought by the top company in there space and all arrington knows to do is tear it down.
why don’t you give credit for entrepreneurs who were able to get an exit for their VCs, employees and themselves in this shitty economy.
Sincerely
Former Techcrunch Reader
Actually, Arrington is spot on. The employees at Spock are not very happy with the acquisition….from what I heard, they didn’t get anything.