Photobucket success provided great return to some, but did it jilt others?
The WSJ has a story today about how investors at Insight Venture Partners made a killing last year when Photobucket was sold to News Corp. for $300 million — even as the firm’s own limited partner’s didn’t make a dime.
Scandal, right?
I just got off the phone with Jeff Horing (below left), one of Insight’s partners, to confirm the story, and it’s more benign than it may seem.
It’s true, Horing said, that several IVP employees invested… Continue Reading
Photobucket offers new tools for third party developers to access its photos
By this point, it has almost become standard for any decent-sized web service to offer an application programming interface — a way for third party developers to build applications that make use of information and distribution channels on a popular site. The most striking example is social network Facebook’s developer platform, which has spawned hundreds of thousands of applications that are now used by millions.
Not to be left out, photo-sharing site Photobucket is publicly launching… Continue Reading
Fox Interactive confirms purchase of Photobucket and Flektor
Fox Interactive Media confirmed it is acquiring photo sharing site Photobucket and another slide-show creator site Flektor, as earlier reported.
See statement here.
RockYou says it’s rocking Slide, but both face trouble
Updated
When we reported that photo widget site Slide said it was the biggest independent widget maker on the web, with 150 million daily slide-show views, someone anonymously commented and said that RockYou’s numbers were better.
Either way, some bad news for both companies came out earlier today. MySpace is reportedly seeking to acquire Flektor, a scrappy, state-of-the-art new service that directly competes with Slide and RockYou, for an estimated $10-20 million, according to Techcrunch.
The implications for… Continue Reading
MySpace to buy Photobucket?
(Update: VentureBeat has now confirmed this with a source, who says details have to be wrapped up before an announcement is made. There is no exact price yet, because that is one of the things still being negotiated. It is somewhere between $400 million, which is Photobucket’s asking price, and $200 million, which is what MySpace asked for. Also, see latest stats below.)
Photo-sharing site Photobucket has agreed on terms to be acquired by the giant… Continue Reading
Roundup: Sabio, Photobucket cont, Technorati, Choicestream, PersonalBee and more
Here’s the latest:
Thanks for patience — First, VB just changed servers. We understand there are a few formatting problems on our front page, feed hiccups and issues with our search engine. We’ll working to fix them.
Sabio Labs raises second round — Sabio is a secretive Palo Alto, Calif. start-up building a new design process for analog chips. It’s likely up to something significant, because Andy Bechtolsheim, the brilliant engineer and co-founder of Sun Microsystems has led a… Continue Reading
MySpace stuffs Photobucket
Updated with second response from Photobucket
Photobucket, the popular photo storing service, recently unveiled new advertising features — as it reportedly seeks to sell itself for hundreds of millions of dollars.
However, MySpace, pissed off by the new features, and perhaps a bit perturbed by the Palo Alto, Ca./Denver-based Photobucket’s momentum (see our post here), has shut down links by MySpace users to their videos and slideshows hosted at Photobucket.
This isn’t the first time MySpace has shut… Continue Reading
Roundup: Apple breaks DRM, DoubleClick bids, IDG scuffle, Photobucket and more
The latest action
Apple to release EMI music without anti-piracy technology — In agreement with music label EMI, Apple is making EMI songs available without digital rights management (DRM) through its iTunes music store. The music will be higher quality, and tracks will cost $1.29, or 30 cents more than the standard 99 cents. This means you can take those songs and put it on any device you want to, a significant development.
Google allegedly joins Microsoft in… Continue Reading
Photobucket, Cuts.com, and new video editing tools
Photobucket, a Silicon Valley start-up, has quietly become the third largest video hosting site after YouTube and MySpace — reporting more than 35,000 videos uploaded every day.
Next Tuesday, it announces some extensive image and video editing tools it hopes will help keep bringing people to the site. These users can post the edited versions to any of several popular sites, such as MySpace, Faceboo or Bebo.
These Photobucket editing tools, to be announced in a… Continue Reading