acconalogo.jpgAccoona, the search engine that launched in 2004 with much hype and little to back it up, recently filed for an IPO, and it smells like a dog.

With more and more tech companies going public, why not join the throng? Accoona bills itself as a search and e-commerce play, but today, John Battelle looked at its S1 and discovered that little to none of its revenue comes from search. In fact, says Slicon Alley Insider, 97.5 percent of its revenue in the first quarter came from consumer electronics and home appliance sales, which is hardly an interesting business.

It gets worse. The company lost $50 million last year, and may be on track to lose more this year.

When the company launched, it brought Bill Clinton in to do the “first” search. During his speech, the former President said “I hope you all get rich, but remember that you are doing something good for humanity, as well.” Indeed.

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  1. August 8th, 2007
    12:00 pm

    Accoona: An IPO amongst the bric-bats said:

    [...] about $80.5 million. According to VentureBeat, the search engine is little more than hype and the Acoona IPO smells like a dog . The “search engine” actually derives most of its revenue not from search, but from an [...]

  2. VentureBeat » Roundup: Skype’s offer, Calacanis, Acoona, Zoho, Bluebet, Tafiti, WikiScanner, more said:

    [...] the third-rate search engine, sees underwriter pull IPO offering — We wrote about the shoddy-looking search engine here. The New York Times says the underwriter has now pulled the IPO. It looks at the strange [...]

2 Comments

  1. Robert Cole said:

    One of the most important chinese financial sites published this article about Accoona going public.
    http://en.ce.cn/Business/Enterprise/200708/31/t20070831_12749678.shtml

  2. Bill Clinton said:

    Hi…Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts..what a nice Friday

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