Xing announced today the acquisition of The NY-based Social|Median, and that its founder and CEO, Jason Goldberg will be assuming the new role of VP Xing Applications Platform. Jason was the founder and CEO of Jobster, back in the day.
Lar Hinrich, Xing's CEO, made the blog post on the company site, but he will be stepping down in the next few weeks (see Lars Hinrich Stepping Down At Xing, Stefan Gross-Selbeck To Lead Xing) so one has to presume this is part of Gross-Selbeck's plans for taking the company out of it's comfort zone in Germany, and expanding globally. The new title for Goldberg is revealing: Xing is planning to become a platform on which other applications can play, lining it up to compete more agressively with LinkedIn and others.
Apparently, the now ancient discussions between Yahoo and Time Warner about the possible acquisition of AOL by Yahoo are still moving along, glacially. Kara Swisher reports that the deal is stalled by a gap of a billion in price:
Yahoo wants to pay about $3 billion to $4 billion dollars, while Time Warner wants $5 billion to $6 billion.
[...]
As for AOL, it is continuing to make cuts of lots of stuff that has not worked and streamline itself for what most expect will be an eventual sale, including lopping off its money-generating access business from its advertising, content and communications one.
So, if it is a good fit, why doesn't Yahoo make the move? Are they afraid that it will be a thing with two heads, as opposed to an integrated whole? Time Warner definitely wants out. Shouldn't they be able to split the difference? I am predicting this will happen.
I am glad I didn't continue in my attempts to make Rael Dornfest's Stikkit personal organizer work, because he's joining Twitter, and Ev Williams and company are retiring Stikkit and Ask Sandy, an email tool, that Rael's Values of N company had developed.
Rael has a strange genius about the tinkery edges of personal productivity, so I bet he'll be cooking up some magic streamflow at Twitter.
I have stopped using Facebook, basically. And while my personal preferences in social tools shouldn't really be taken as some reflection of where the population of users are headed, my instincts are that I am a bellwether, an indication of things to come.
Facebook's model of interaction and the user experience has a very established model, one in which Facebook intrudes too significantly, for my taste. So I don't buy the valuation or the plans for its central role as a platform for social applications.
Therefore, I think Twitter -- specifically Ev Williams and his senior team and board -- have done the right thing by walking away from a deal with Facebook, as reported by Kara Swisher and echoed by others:
But, more important, it seems, was a feeling among Twitter investors and execs that the start-up should still take a shot at building its revenues–there are none right now–as well as it had done at building its growth.
I agree that there are many obvious ways for Twitter to start making money, and they should do so, as soon as practical.
Meanwhile, I expect that Facebook's valuation will start to fall. The new millenium's equivalent of AOL, although the econolypse may have burst their growth bubble before they could start gobbling up media companies.
I guess I can confess that I am baffled by Yahoo, a company that only a few years ago had such promise and was buying up what I would have bet was a critical mass of social tools companies -- Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc. -- but was unable to herd the cats up the beach. Really smart innovators -- Jeff Bonforte, Eric Marcoullier, Joshua Schachter, Stewart Butterfield, Catarina Fake, etc. -- were brought into the company and lost. I had expected that some Einsteinian social theory of everythingness would emerge from that group, but instead Mark Zuckerberg's 'social graph' spoutings have captured the tech scene's imagination instead.
So the braintrust has left the building, including people that really got it, like Bradley Horowitz -- now at Google -- and now Yang is hoping to buttress the companies diminishing management team by acquiring AOL?
Definite topics: the progress of talks to buy AOL from Time Warner (TWX)–probably Yahoo’s most attractive option, if it can get a good price–and which are more serious than has been reported; whether the company has any strategic interest in making up with Microsoft (MSFT) after a year of acrimony; how the company can attract new top-level talent to reinvigorate itself; how to make nice with disgruntled major investors; and, of course, how to react to the troubled economy, which is sure to impact the advertising business.
In fact, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang is acutely aware that he and his management team have only a few months to really show investors and employees that they can get things moving at the beleaguered company.
Oddly enough, the Wall Street meltdown might not be such a bad thing for Yahoo, given that investors have a lot of other bigger problems to worry about now.
In relative terms, with a strong balance sheet, the company is quite healthy compared with many firms.
While a possible recession and subsequent negative impact on the ad market is not a good thing for Yahoo, it is not a good thing for anyone in the space.
And Yahoo remains one of the top players in terms of size and will be the place advertisers flee to in times of uncertainty.
[...]
But, the deal would give Yahoo some more experienced executives it needs, and make it more attractive to others who might not consider going to Yahoo in its present state.
Yang had been pinging a lot of execs over the last year and has had little uptake.
Big surprise. But I am baffled about the idea of getting 'experienced managers' from AOL, which has had it's own braindrain over the past few years.
I know Yang has to do something or get executed, and it has to be an acquisition since the company has squandered the past few years and lost the bright minds that might have come up with something. But this?
Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Jabber, Inc. for an undisclosed amount. This is just the most recent of a series of acquisitions -- Webex being the largest, and PostPath the most recent -- where Cisco has clearly demonstrated it's desire to contend with Microsoft for the large and growing market for enterprise collaboration.
I was unable to attend GigaOm's Mobilize event, but the CTO of Cisco spoke there about Cisco goals in the market:
Yesterday at GigaOM’s Mobilize event, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told the audience that the company believes collaboration to be a $34 billion business, and emphasized the move away from selling only networking gear. Services are a crucial part of the that strategy and a robust presence platform is one of the essential services in offering real-time collaboration that Warrior highlighted in her keynote. And for those keeping score in Microsoft/Cisco showdown, Jabber (which Om has called the platform of choice for voice-over-IM) is way more compelling that what I’ve seen demonstrated in Microsoft’s unified communcations efforts through SharePoint.
Jabber Inc. has always been a innovative force, but its technology has generally been used by telephone carriers and large software companies -- like Oracle -- as a component of larger solutions. Jabber Inc. has never really had an impact at the consumer level, like AOL's AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Microsoft Messenger. While Apple has used the XMPP protocol in iChat, and Google has adopted XMPP for its Gtalk system, neither of these are based on Jabber Inc. technology, but are based on the XMPP protocol pioneered by Jabber Inc as well as the open source Jabber community.
With this acquisition, the smart folks and strong technology that has been developed at Jabber Inc. over the past years could become part of a new platform strategy from Cisco. I can't wait to talk to Paul Guerin and Joe Hildebrand about their plans as part of the much larger Cisco. Look for that next week.
[Full disclosure: Jabber Inc. is a former client of mine; I have no financial interest in the company or in Cisco.]
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