Web 2.0 Acquisitions: Who’s Next?
Google bought YouTube. Yahoo may buy Facebook. Other web 2.0 companies such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming, Measure Map, and Writely have been snapped up - so who’s next? Here are a few of my top bets:
- Digg - democratic news site
- Technorati - blog search engine
- Riya - facial search recognition
- LinkedIn - business social network
- Zoho - online office product suite
- Opera - mobile web browser
- StumbleUpon - web discovery tool
Obviously the Internet giants (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay) would be the most likely potential acquisitors. But media conglomerates (FOX Interactive, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner) may also be potential acquisitors. FOX has already bought MySpace and Viacom has been on the prowl for awhile.
So which web 2.0 company/companies do you think will be acquired next? By who? Drop a comment with your thoughts.
October 13th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Most I would agree are on big business’s radar, but I’m not sure about ZOHO. ZOHO, some may not know, is an R&D department of a much larger company, AdventNet (http://www.adventnet.com/). AdventNet specializes in enterprise IT. My guess is that ZOHO is a bottom up, or long-tail (if you like buzzwords) approach to expand their market reach. Most likely, not for sale (unless with all things, the price is right).
October 13th, 2006 at 10:02 am
My thought was that a company like Yahoo or a media conglomerate may want to enter the online office suite area, as Microsoft obviously already has an Office package and Google has one in the works.
It is a very lucrative area with profits to be had, but a strong fit needs to be there. A real-time, collaborative office suite is the future of the Internet.