There must be something in the air today – quite a number of acquisitions were announced.
Fox Interactive Media acquired Photobucket and Flektor. Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp, is the parent of MySpace. Photobucket is a popular photo sharing side, and the 34th most visited site on the Internet. Flektor is a site that allows users to create slide-show mashups from audio, video, and photos.
CBS acquired Last.fm Last.fm might be better known to some as AudioScrobbler, which was absorbed into Last.fm some time back. Last.fm has plug-ins for popular music software, such as iTunes, and it will track your listening habits. It then suggests new music, and lets you listen to some online. There are also social networking aspects to the site, as you can link to friends, join communities, etc. This is my Last.fm profile, I use it mainly to track my listening habits.
eBay acquired StumbleUpon. eBay? I’m not sure I get it. I could kind of see Skype, maybe using it to connect buyers and sellers, etc. And, of course, way back when, buying PayPal made perfect sense. But StumbleUpon? I’m not sure how that fits into eBay’s business. eBay had this to say:
“StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust,” eBay’s senior director Michael Buhr said in a statement. “StumbleUpon’s downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay.”
OK… I still don’t see it. Guess I’ll just have to wait and see how they glue it onto their operations.
