Egmont acquires Manolo

Björn & co at Manolo have, for the second time, sold the Swedish fashion blog to a large publisher. This time it is Egmont Tidskrifter, publisher of the fashion magazine King among many other things, that has acquired Manolo from the founders and the main shareholder Sydsvenskan. From what I've seen, the price has not been disclosed. Press release.

Sometimes winning is a bad thing

With Microsoft's $47.5 billion (at $33 per share) bid for Yahoo withdrawn, at least for the time being, some people label it as a failure for Steve Ballmer. It might be a failure in the sense that the deal didn't go through, but on the other hand had the deal gone through success wasn't guaranteed. One is probably well-served to remember that most (friendly) major mergers and acquisitions don't create long-term shareholder value.

In order to create value after paying anywhere near $50 billion, a lot of things have to go right. Anyone can decide what the odds of a lot of things going right would be with the actions taken by Yahoo to discourage Microsoft's bid, Yahoo's weakening position in search, the likelihood of having to spin out either Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail and the business operational issues of both Yahoo! and MSN.

Where people find the time

Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Conference: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (full, but lightly edited, transcript of the video below). Good stuff!



"Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."

(via: SIME Blog)

Microsoft withdraws Yahoo offer

After three months of discussions, Microsoft has decided to withdraw its bid to acquire Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo's shareholders react Monday, when Yahoo's share price is likely to fall back to pre-bid levels in the low $20's instead of hovering below $30. Especially as Microsoft says it raised the price in private discussions with Yahoo's board to $33 per share.

• Microsoft press release
  
• Yahoo press release
  
• New York Times
  
• TechCrunch
  

Stardoll - A Webware 100 2008 Winner

For the second year in a row Stardoll managed to win a Webware 100 award. Other winners in the Social category were Bebo, deviantART, Facebook, Friendster, Gaia Online, Google Groups, LiveJournal, MySpace and Yahoo! Groups. A very nice company to be in. All 100 Winners.

What to look for in startups?

I've got a decent draft, but it needs some editing before being publishable, of a post on what I think a person thinking about joining a startup should look for. With quite a few company founders, startup employees and investors among the readers, feel free to share your thoughts on the subject in the comments or in an e-mail.

What VideoPlaza is not doing

I like VideoPlaza's not-todo-list. As a startup you cannot, and shouldn't try to, do everything. Once you decided what to do, writing down what not to do will make it easier to focus as you grow. In the case of VideoPlaza, I think they should be more specific about what kinds of 'advanced' targeting they are not doing (for the time being) and write that. I assume it would be image-based and behavioral targeting, but for a lot of publishers and advertisers providing something like good demographic targeting is still quite advanced.

Skype did $126 million in revenue Q1

Ebay reported Q1 financial results late Wedensday. Personally I find Skype's development to be the most interesting. Skype had $126 million in revenue for the first three months of 2008, 63 % higher than Q1 2007 and about 9 % higher than Q4 2007. Not as seasonal as eBay's core marketplaces business. It doesn't seem unlikely for Skype to be doing a little over $600 million in revenue this year. Not too shabby. =)

For comparison, revenues for eBay marketplaces was $1.484 billion and Paypal $582 million for the same period.

Four (good) Sunday links

Kevin Kelly - 1,000 True Fans. "A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans."

More interesting than Chris Anderson's Free meme, imho.

Evan Williams - The Focus Paradox. "Both Facebook and Google had early success in (large?) part because of their focus. Google in terms of what they did, Facebook in terms of who could use it.

That success provided both pressure and opportunities to grow in new directions. Expansion is always tricky, and each company has handled it in different ways." (note: focus is not the same thing as niche)

Fred Wilson - One a day. "There's just something about limiting yourself to one a day that creates something special. You don't want to waste the opportunity on something average, so you carefully select the one thing you are gong to showcase or possibly create. And when viewed over time, it's way more than that. It's a timeline to your life."

Umair Haque (Edge Economy) - How to fix venture capital. "Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?

The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically.

Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.

Let's replay the Google story. Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo - what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time - didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.

Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. Because it did, it held on and revolutionized the advertising value chain ? and, in turn, capital markets gave Google an exuberant welcome.

See the point? If all Larry, Sergey, and Google's investors had wanted to do was to sell out fast to the highest bidder, they could have done so at any time. But they didn't: they chose to revolutionize something that sucked - and so a tsunami of new value was unlocked. That's how Google was made."

Fokus on the Internet and the cloud

Fredrik Wass has written this week's big feature for Swedish weekly magazine Fokus. The feature is about the Internet and the cloud. A very good read.

• Molnet förändrar allt
  
• Kampen om annonserna (I'm quoted)
  
• Genvägen till nätet
  
• 50 år med Internet
  
• Åtta framtidsvisioner om Internet