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Posts Tagged ‘Undisclosed Sum’

MySpace Music buys, crushes Imeem

In a ferocious display of anti social behavior, News Corp.-owned MySpace Music bought its competitor Imeem today and tore it down. Imeem.com, imeem content embedded in other sites and the Imeem plug-in itself have all been, for lack of a better word, killed.

Imeem was bought for an undisclosed sum though most speculation centers around $8 to 10 million. The site now redirects to a MySpace page explaining that MySpace is working to transfer Imeem profiles and playlists to MySpace. No time line is given.

Given that Imeem seems to have been destroyed, with MySpace choosing not to retain its technology or web site, the purchase and subsequent actions can only be seen as hostile. Even if Imeem.com’s users switch to Pandora or Mog, developer Lee Martin thinks there is a hole to fill. Martin developed twt.fm — an application that reached 1.5 users by enabling streaming music through twitter. On his blog, Martin says “…Myspace shows up to pull one of the best API platforms out from developers’ feet without warning…We [API developers] need a new streaming API partner or our services will die.”

This move follows weeks of speculation that MySpace would be purchasing Imeem. Imeem had been in financial distress for some time, even going so far as to lay off 25 percent of its staff in October 2008. I’m assuming the remaining 75 percent to be unemployed as well after today’s buyout / annihilation.

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Facebook And StudiVZ Dispute Ends With Settlement
Facebook and StudiVZ have reached a settlement in the alleged plagiarism case, with the German social network operator paying Zuckerberg and co an undisclosed sum as part of the deal. Both companies will be withdrawing their respective claims both in the United States and Germany and continue to operate their business as before (statement in German).

StudiVZ and Facebook have agreed not to disclose any more details about the settlement.

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Benchmark Capital’s Big Day

If you’re a partner at Benchmark Capital, you’re having a very good day and celebrating two separate portfolio acquisitions.

That’s sort of like an unassisted triple play in baseball, it just doesn’t happen that often. Maybe that’s why the team looks so darn happy in their website picture. Partner Peter Fenton (labeled Rock Star in photo) led both deals.

The first is Friendfeed, which was acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum. Benchmark was the sole venture capital investor in Friendfeed, which raised a $5 million in an early 2008. Benchmark now has stock in Facebook, the hottest IPO prospect in Silicon Valley right now.

The second is the much larger deal – VMWare’s $400+ million acquisition of Springsource, an enterprise and web application development and management startup. Benchmark was the biggest investor in Springsource, which raised a total of $15 million in two rounds of financing prior to the acquisition.

These weren’t the only wins for Benchmark this year, either. They were also investors in Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco for $590 million) and OpenTable (went public in May).

Benchmark still holds the record for (probably) the best venture investment in history – they turned a $6.7 million investment in eBay in 1997 into $5 billion by 1999. Partner Bill Gurley talks about that deal and Benchmark in general in our video interview with him last year.

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Gaming Software Company Arkadium Acquires Advergame.com

Arkadium, an NYC-based company that markets gaming software for brands, ad agencies, casino operators and online game websites, has bought Advergame.com for an undisclosed sum and has revamped its gaming portal GreatDayGames with a number of additional features to boot.

According to the company, customized advergames offer a fresh approach to exposing consumers to a brand and “keep them coming back for more”. Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium says: “The majority of display ads shown to gamers today are irrelevant to the player and worthless to the publisher. Casual gamers spend thousands of hours playing online and are highly receptive to relevant advertisements.”

Hence them betting on advergaming as a concept to find widespread adoption among marketers worldwide and creating some brand awareness by purchasing the relevant domain name / business Advergame.com.

Arkadium says it currently boasts an online network of more than 250 Flash-based games that attracts over five million monthly unique users and is running a profitable operation, servicing big name clients Warners Bros., CBS, NBC, General Electric, Reader’s Digest, Mattel and Hasbro. The company also claims it serves more than 120 million page views each month within its game Arenas, with users spending an average of 20 minutes each session.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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