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Yahoo Purchases Zimbra For $350 Million

Doug Caverly — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:04:00 +0000

Zimbra’s “About Us” page is pretty nice – there are concise statements regarding what the company does, who it works with, and how to contact it. The page may need an overhaul, however, as it also offers an option to “View Google Map,” and word has it that Zimbra was just acquired by Yahoo.

The “word,” as such, comes from both Kara Swisher and Michael Arrington, which should satisfy any skeptics. There aren’t yet any press releases, but Arrington states that his information came from “a very solid source,” and Zimbra’s price was “$350 million, in cash, confirmed.”

Zimbra, which makes “open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software,” has received a fair amount of positive attention in recent months. Also, just six days ago, the company was able to announce the registration of its 10,000th forum member. (“We have a very good spam moderation system, and are fairly confident that just about all of those registrations are genuine,” John Holder added on the Zimbra Blog.)

So the acquisition looks like a good move on Yahoo’s part. And as Swisher notes, this development follows the purchases of both BlueLithium and BuzzTracker; it seems like Yahoo has decided acquisitions may be the best way to attain some success.

As always, only time will tell if the strategy works. Meanwhile, look for a link to Yahoo Maps to appear on Zimbra’s “About Us” page.

Yahoo Buys BuzzTracker

Andy Beal — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:19:48 +0000

The big news from Yahoo today is they will announce the acquisition of news aggregator BuzzTracker. All Things Digital suggests the deal has been done and that Yahoo has paid $5 million, after passing on more expensive options such as Sphere.

So what does BuzzTracker do? It’s kind of like Techmeme…

BuzzTracker creates ?custom content feeds? automatically that aggregate news, blogs, reviews, discussions, video and audio. But to add a level of quality, it handpicks the 90,000 online content sources it uses.

The acquisition demonstrates Yahoo’s continued vision of acquiring eyeballs by buying social media sites. Additionally, All Things Digital suggests Yahoo might be ready to take on Digg…

According to sources at Yahoo, the company has already built a Digg competitor, but has not launched it yet. It is not clear if that effort would be integrated into BuzzTracker or not.

That’s not that far-fetched, especially when you consider Yahoo already has the technology in place.

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Yahoo Tracks Down BuzzTracker

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:28:07 +0000

Yahoo is expected to announce the acquisition of BuzzTracker, a news aggregation site, for a reported figure of $5 million.

BuzzTracker has been in beta, and when it eventually emerges from that status, it will be as a Yahoo property.

Kara Swisher at All Things D said Yahoo should disclose the purchase of BuzzTracker today. A price hasn’t been announced, though Swisher cited sources close to BuzzTracker owner Participate Media as saying the check will be around $5 million.

BuzzTracker aggregates items across over a thousand topics from 90,000 blogs. They generate news pages for those topics. Integration with Flickr and YouTube gives them pictures and videos to display that match the topics in question.

Swisher suggested that Yahoo made the BuzzTracker deal when the price of similar services got too rich.

“Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space, said sources, such as the San Francisco-based Sphere,” she said. “But those trendier (and more popular) startups apparently had too lofty valuations.”