Techcrunch, as speculated has been acquired by AOL.
Michael Arrington candidly puts it
“The truth is I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.”
Hope its not a RIP moment or witness of content farm in making. Kudos to Mike for bootstrapping his way out. The deal is rumored to be around $40mn.
By the way, it was an acquisition day for AOL – they acquired 5min Media, Brizzly and Thing Labs ( AOL owns Endgadget, TUAW, Download Squad and Switched).
My take on this deal – “mixed feelings after TC’s acquisition story..i cant imagine @arrington working for a big co..that’s totally unTC (unStartup)#HoleInSoul”
OpenOffice.org, liberated from Oracle
A group of key contributors to the OpenOffice.org (OOo) project have formed a new organization called the Document Foundation to manage a community-driven fork of the popular open source office suite. Their goal is to liberate the project from Oracle’s control and create a more inclusive and participatory ecosystem around the software[source].
“When Sun Microsystems decided to release the OpenOffice.org software under an open-source licence a decade ago, it was making an act of faith in Community based development, which it hoped would one day lead to an independent foundation. This gamble has proved hugely successful, and today OpenOffice.org is unquestionably the world’s leading open-source productivity suite. As the Community approached its second decade, a consensus gradually emerged among leading Community contributors that a new organisational model was needed to take it forward. From the options available, an independent, community owned and managed democratic foundation emerged as the best solution.
For ten years we have used the same name – "OpenOffice.org" – for both the Community and the software. We’ve decided it removes ambiguity to have a different name for the two, so the Community is now "The Document Foundation", and the software "LibreOffice". “ – details
Wikipedia Experimenting with P2P Sharing
Wikipedia is experimenting with P2P sharing in order to cut bandwidth cost.
“The P2P-Next consortium is an EU-funded project exploring the future of Internet video distribution. Their aims are to dramatically reduce the costs of video distribution through community CDNs and P2P technology. They recently presented at Gdansk Wikimania 2010, and today I am happy to invite the Wikimedia community to try out their latest experimental efforts to greatly reduce video distribution costs. Swarmplayer V2.0 is being released today for Firefox (an Internet Explorer plugin is in testing). The Swamplayer enables visitors to easily share their upload bandwidth to help distribute video. The add-on works with the Kaltura HTML5 library ( aka mwEmbed ) and url2torrent.net, to enable visitors to help offset distribute costs of any Ogg Theora video embed in any web page.” – details (via: RWW)
Twitter Beats MySpace in Traffic
As per Comscore’s latest report, Twitter has beaten MySpace in web traffic (pdf). Though marginal difference (Twitter had 96 million UUs, vs. MySpace’s 95mn).
Also, Twitter has phased out @earlybird advertising service.
Video of the Day : Sony LiveView
Check out this awesome product from LiveView
