Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the…
Eight months ago, we posted an excerpt from a video former Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo's made in which he explains life after being acquired by Google. A standup comedian, Costolo plays the sad clown in the video, explaining that at Google he's got a significant job title, though "you can't tell by the words in it."…
Click to viewA year after Google bought RSS-feed ad network FeedBurner for a rumored $100 million, FeedBurner's death was announced informally in a Google Groups thread. Publishers are expected to use Google's own AdSense instead. CenterNetworks publisher Allen Stern explains his frustration in the above video:…
Google prides itself on running its business by the numbers. But its FeedBurner unit, which tracks subscribers to RSS feeds, has laughably inaccurate numbers, writes venture capitalist and blogger Brad Feld. One out of six of his 117,000 RSS subscribers come from automated signups, he believes; those users rarely if…
Microsoft is asking News Corp. to help it buy Yahoo. Yahoo wants AOL and Google to help it remain independent. Meanwhile, writes VC blogger Fred Wilson, websites and services acquired by these companies like Flickr, AIM, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Groups, and FeedBurner continue to languish. Which is why Wilson thinks…
Dick Costolo used to be CEO of FeedBurner, a Chicago startup which publishes RSS feeds for websites. But then FeedBurner got acquired by Google. Now Costolo's got a "significant title" at Google, though, as he explains in this you video, "you can't tell by the words in it." Even before FeedBurner, Costolo used to…
In private moments, Dodgeball cofounder Dennis Crowley will tell any startup entrepreneur in New York asking: Avoid getting acquired by Google. "Sure, he's not upset about the $40 million and he's glad to be dating models," a source close to Crowley told me. "But he's not happy with Google." Not all Google-acquired…
While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "…
Ego-blogger Robert Scoble,TechCrunch proprietor Michael Arrington, and others along with many of their followers whiled away the weekend manually tallying up RSS-feed subscriber numbers via Google's Reader application for popular blogs. Why?
Can we, at last, put to rest any whispers by jealous Sand Hill Road rivals about the strengths of Fred Wilson's portfolio? The New York-based venture capitalist, a partner at Union Square Ventures, has ably spotted the most profitable segments of targeted marketing and online publishing, from social bookmarks…
Not that you care about one startup buying another, especially when it's already on that ubiquitous Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch, but RSS marketing network Feedburner bought blog analytic company Blogbeat. Blogbeat's homepage has a rundown of the deal. (We previously thought Feedburner bought Nooked, as posted here.)
A few readers say Nooked isn't the lucky little company to get snapped up by RSS marketing powerhouse Feedburner, despite an earlier report. It's actually buying a US startup that was once close to a deal with Yahoo.
Update: Rumor disconfirmed — this was a bum tip.
"I was walking down Valencia Street," says a friend of Valleywag. "Some dude on his phone, yacking. I walked closer to listen, and I heard, 'Feedburner will announce an acquisition.'"
