The company that Fox Interactive acquired: Newroo

March 14, 2006 | Matt Marshall

So the secret is out.

Silicon Valley was abuzz a few days ago about which company News Corp, via its Fox Interactive subsidiary, acquired around the time of the Under the Radar conference.

Turns out it is NewRoo, a San Francisco team of three guys, and bidding price is between $5M and $10M, according to a well-placed source. NewRoo, led by Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, has developed a Web site that helps users customize their own news aggregator service. It offers you a topic area by selecting certain relevant news and blog sources and then you can customize around it. We tried the service out about a week ago, and thought it made a lot of sense. The question was, how do you make money off it. Fox may have figured that feeding its video or other image to people looking for particular topics might make sense for them.

This company had no venture backing. However, the deal is still in the termsheet stage, and should take a couple of more weeks to close. After the deal closes, the team will be leaving Silicon Valley, and joining Fox’s headquarters.

We first mentioned them here.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.