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Salesforce.com’s Incubator: René Bonvanie (Part 7)

Posted on Tuesday, Jun 12th

I continue my discussion regarding the need for Incubator companies to receive assistance in their initial customer acquisition phase. I push Rene a fair bit. I think he is getting slightly annoyed and defensive 🙂 SM: If you go back to the beginnings of Salesforce.com, and you ask Mark Benioff, I am sure he will

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eBay’s Next Few Acquisitions

Posted on Friday, Jun 8th

eBay’s StumbleUpon acquisition is done. I wrote about it, in eBay’s Foray’s into Media. Not much to add on the topic, except that the price has changed. eBay eventually ended up acquiring the company for $75 Million. One critical point I made in my previous analysis is that eBay needs to plug the leakage in

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Google’s Radio Ads Yet To Take Off

Posted on Wednesday, Jun 6th

After Google acquired dMarc in January last year, it was hoped that its AdWords customers in US would shortly have an option to place audio ads across prominent radio stations. dMarc is a California based company that facilitates advertisers to directly connect radio stations through its automated advertising platform. dMarc’s addition to Google’s formidable arsenal

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Shutterfly: Acquisition Target?

Posted on Wednesday, Jun 6th

Jim Clark launched Shutterfly on December 13, 1999. On the same day Clark’s partner from Netscape, Jim Barksdale, launched Ofoto. Shutterfly is headquartered at Redwood Shores, California and offers storing, sharing, enhancing and printing of photos, as well as photo merchandise. Shutterfly has over 900 million photographs in its archive and was awarded the Field

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News Corp’s Vertical Posturing

Posted on Tuesday, Jun 5th

News Corp has just acquired Photobucket in a strategic move to monetize its MySpace asset. My prior writings leading up to this acquisition are below: * News Corp : Bewildered Pioneer * Monetize the MySpace Parasites * Web 3.0 and Photobucket * Web 3.0 & Photo Sharing : Overview * Web 3.0 & Photosharing :

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Online Video Ads: Acquisition Targets?

Posted on Friday, Jun 1st

Online Advertising has been getting lots of attention, evidenced by Google’s Doubleclick acquisition, Microsoft’s aQuantive acquisition, and Yahoo’s RightMedia acquisition. My earlier post discusses additional potential roll-ups in the world of online advertising agencies. Online video advertising, a relatively newer concept in Internet marketing, is fast becoming an important opportunity, evidenced in a study indicating

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Microsoft’s Online Strategy

Posted on Thursday, May 31st

Microsoft has been scrambling in many markets. Particularly, it has been scrambling in the Internet segment, with Google dominating the online advertising space, and MSN lagging versus Yahoo as a portal. I have said before, that the big money in new media is going to be in the verticals. Microsoft actually has a very good

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Web 3.0 & Photo Sharing: Synthesis

Posted on Thursday, May 31st

Photo sharing is one of the top segments online and the top 10 photo sharing sites in the US draws as many as 50 million users every month. According to Hitwise, 4.9% of all Internet traffic went to the top 20 social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Photobucket, Flickr and Facebook, making photo sharing one

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