Open The Dialogue

As if the M&A frenzy wasn't already cruising along at the speed of light, Tuesday brought the news that Andy Baio's "side project," Upcoming.org, had been purchased by Yahoo!. The free-to-use calendar site has been super useful to me, and the ability to snag an RSS feed for any locality you choose in order to keep tabs on what is going on in your neighborhood is great.

It certainly looks like companies are seeing the light when it comes to recreation of the wheel and attempting to attract new users to their networks. I'm never one to think that these moves are bad choices on the part of the original creators/owners, but there have been varied stories in the past about how a product or service is used when it transitions to the big firm's control - let's hope that Yahoo! treads carefully with the users of Upcoming. Here's Yahoo!'s take on the move.

Congrats to Andy, Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin! Looks like yet another "acqhire" for the books (Thanks, Rex!)

[via Scoble]

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last night, Om Malik scored a big one when he informed about NewsGator's intent to purchase RSS feed newsreader NetNewsWire, which runs on the Mac OS. This comes less than six months after the firm purchased Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon (which I use at both home and work) - and it's probably not the last move of this type. This afternoon, I read over at Scoble's that yes indeed, NewsGator has purchased Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire.

Why all the fuss? Well, NewsGator has taken the "tough noogies" out of acquisitions by opening up its existing platform to users of various software - in this case NetNewsWire and FeedDemon - adding a new level of functionality (synchronization at multiple locations, online access when software isn't available) while keeping you, the user, comfortable. So while it is a subscription service, current users of those packages have been given two years of access to NewsGator's offerings - and don't have to "change" the way they were using their RSS reader prior to this event. Additionally, this creates an excellent - and true - cross-platform integration (through NewsGator Online) of a service that's important to many blog authors, readers, and other users of RSS.

Posted by Tom Biro at 05:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)