StumbleUpon, a content discovery service that was acquired by eBay (s EBAY) for a rumored $75 million (or more) is free again. The company was spun out of eBay today as an independent company. Co-founders Garret Camp and Geoff Smith are taking control of the independent company that is also backed by August Capital, Accel Partners and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures. StumbleUpon was yet another acquisition that eBay has managed to bungle, prompting Camp and his cohorts to come back from the wilderness, so to speak. On the company blog, Camp notes:
This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus – helping people discover interesting web content. Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there. While there will be some internal changes at SU, it will not impact the Stumbling experience and will help us create the best possible product.
StumbleUpon, like so many others these days, is also building a URL shortener that is likely to be introduced sometime soon. Interestingly, the spin-out of StumbleUpon is proof that eBay CEO John Donhaue is pretty serious about rationalizing the auction company’s business. In the meantime, rumors that the Skype founders are trying to buy back the Internet calling service from eBay have started to surface as well.
Skype will get spun out also as soon as the CEO figures out how to minimize eBays loss on the whole mess. Once that is done eBay then might want to focus on its once competent core of letting people sell junk in their garage to other people. These days eBay is more like a grey market for overseas operations to sell you cheap knockoffs in the states then it is an actual auction site.
Daniel
Looks like the founders at SKype are ready to rock and are looking to raise money to get this done. And frankly that deal couldn’t come soon enough.
Best
I will say its a great news, the baby is back home after a day out. No one can manage Stumble better then the man himself CAMP – thumbs up
Ebay has proven that it doesn’t really know what to do with anything it buys. Ebay needs to get back to their core business which is auctions and leave everything else alone. Period. At any rate SU is a great site and now that the original people are back, maybe they will do it right.