JotSpot, Reddit & YouTube: Mergers and Accusations
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 31, 2006 | Share This
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Three fairly significant stories related to Internet M & A.
First, Google has acquired Wiki software JotSpot, a company that gives users tools to build their own wikis. JotSpot founder Joe Kraus claims that they anticipate becoming a part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and are eager to work with Google’s “world-class data centers and team of incredibly smart people.” JotSpot already features collaborative calendars, spreadsheets, documents and photo galleries - so I’m curious as to how this will get integrated with Google’s existing collaborative office tools (picasa, docs and spreadsheets, calendar, groups). While JotSpot’s integration into Google Office tools seems fairly obvious, I wonder if they’ll attempt any sort of integration with Google Checkout (a la ShopWiki), Google Local (the knock-off Yelp), or even Google Co-Op (a collaborative custom search engine?).
Second, Conde Nast has picked up Reddit, a popular social bookmarking application. Reports thus far indicate that Reddit will be associated with Wired (Conde Nast’s token nerd-zine), but will retain its original branding and funtionality. Based on the official Reddit Blog annoucement, it seems like Reddit’s primary concern is retaining their loyal user base in the transition. For that reason, they’ve made a point to emphasize that nothing but ownership is changing in the acquisition. In the meantime, the Reddit purchase increases the stakes for Digg acquistion rumors.
Finally, the Google/YouTube deal is still making headlines — today the blogosphere erupted with flurries of gossip after Mark Cuban’s blog, Blog Maverick, published details of the back-end media deals that led up to the purchase. The post details two key agreements that Google had to make in order to ensure profit from the YouTube deal,
“The first request…was an agreement to look the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about building tools to help manage the content and track royalties, some of which is true but also G knows that every day they can operate in the shadows of copyright law is another day that Youtube can grow… The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow them down and lock in Youtube’s position. As Google looked at it they bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement. Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and Grouper.”
Blog Maverick end with the speculation, “Expect a claim of collusion between Google and the media companies as a defense strategy.” It’s unclear how much of the accusations is based on fact and how much is fabricated, but this is not the first time the Google/Youtube deal has been called collusion. Two weeks ago, the New York Times suggested as much in “Music Companies Grab a Share of YouTube Sale, and ZDNet said it outright in “YouTube/Universal/SonyBMG: One big happy collusion?. As to the validity of the information, Cuban writes, “I can’t say this has been fact checked. It hasn’t. I can’t say its 100 pct accurate, I don’t know. But it rings true, and as I said, I trust the source.”
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