So who’s laughing now? The news of Yahoo and Flickr hooking up is finally official. Applause… and those of you who were laughing and ridiculing my exclusive.… well happy millions. This right from the Flickr blog.:
Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks! Woohoo! What does this mean? It means that we’ll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid, schedule conjugal visits between trips to the colo….wait!
Jeff calls is safety strategy. I call it “New Road to Riches” which if you buy Business 2.0, you might have read last year. The new road is – build it, flip it, or in this case scream Yahoo! My sources tell me the price tag is close to $35 million, and not rumored $30 million.
Congratulations to the Ludicorp team! I believe it was absolutelly the right time to sell!
The main problem business models in the area of web services, such as online photo storing services or hosted blogging services, suffer is that everyone can build a me-too product in almost no time…
Companies in this space should definitively think about protecting their innovation by filing for patents.
I know that many people are not friends of Intellectual Property, but as a small start-up it’s very difficult to compete with companies such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft once they decide to enter the market and to copy your inventions. They simply can allocate a team of experts, built a competitive service within weeks and advertise it to their customer base.
We will see how start-up companies such as SixApart will develop in the future…
I don’t speak for my editorial colleagues, but I’m curious why you seem to have an axe to grind with CNET News.com.
not an axe to grind – but every single time you guys get credits mixed up and never mention the bloggers who break the stories. and no its not me i am talking about there – it has happened so many times before that i get irked by it.
Got tired of the small comment window. 😉 See my further response at clock, my personal blog.
john Well if that is not the case, well how about mashing up the who got the news on Lj-SA first, or more recently the one about Virgin Electronics shutting down. Need i bring up more examples. Glenn Fleishman and Rafat Ali would have a lot to add about that –
Om
The litany of woes against News.com runs long…the problem is their posing: the internal word is: oh, when we were new, it happened to us. So if it is happening to you now, just suck it up. The arrogance stems from the top, but I’ll leave it at that…
Om, I’ll chime in more after others do…
New Road to Riches was an awesome read – practical business sense! Excel and sell. 🙂 I’m eager to see how the Yahoo!-Flickr! deal opens up new vistas for photobloggers and taggers. Buzznet is also cool, yes, that too may get picked up soon – but it could surely use some Flash!
This deal certainly raises the value proposition of buzznet and fotolog. lets see how this shakes out.
The Flickr deal brings to light more details of Yahoo! and their current strategy as it relates to RSS (and Media RSS). A quote from Caterina Fake is very telling:
âThe things that were important to us were: being open, building
innovative stuff and kicking ass. Were these people OUR people?
Yes. See the stuff Yahoo’s announced recently (including, of
course,this)? They’re evolving in really interesting ways —
and from our look inside, we know that there’s a lot more
coming.â?
I believe this is the first step in a series of efforts by Yahoo! to focus a lot more attention on âcitizenâs mediaâ?-type products and services. Theyâve integrated a relatively simple and effective RSS feed reader into their my.yahoo.com and theyâre certainly not going to stop there. Flickr is a natural extension of this strategy and will be integrated directly into my.yahoo.com. (I would expect some promising TV/video integration shortly.) The bottom line is that Yahoo! has gotten religion on the whole idea that consumers are also producers of digital media (and that this market may someday rival the existing mass-market for digital content). Expect my.yahoo.com to feature very prominently in Yahoo!âs overall business plan and expect to see a whole range of open media aggregation efforts in the near future. (That Semel guy isnât following the path that most Hollywood execs would have. I predict Yahoo! will be scary successful in this effort.)
$35 Million for all that Flickr Hype?
That is probably less than a penny per fawning article/blog in the last 15 months….
as far as Cnet & News.com not crediting sources, here is a good example post on a friends site. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1208