Amid stormy economic seas, auction giant eBay has thrown overboard StumbleUpon, the recommendation and "discovery" start-up that it purchased in 2007 for approximately $75 million.
Replacing corny nautical puns with corny alcohol puns, this looks like a symptom of the hangover that followed eBay's acquisition binge during Web 2.0's heyday. Even though many speculated that eBay would use StumbleUpon's technology to power product recommendations, the two companies just didn't find a fit--or a way to make a decent return. eBay's acquisition habits have been more vocally criticized when it comes to Skype, the online telephony start-up that was acquired for $2.6 billion in 2005. It's a well-received product, but never had an obvious niche within eBay and observers have long speculated it would do better on its own.
Financial terms of the StumbleUpon spinoff were not disclosed, but it appears that the company was sold back to the two founders, Garrett Camp (who will serve as CEO) and Geoff Smith, and investors Accel Partners, August Capital, and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures.
"We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths," Camp said in a statement. "This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web's largest recommendation service."
Last fall, a rumor spread that eBay had hired investment bank Deutsche Bank to help find a buyer for StumbleUpon.
The big question now: Will it do the same with Skype?
(Credit:
Adrian Pike/TechCrunch)
A lucky Google user, Adrian Pike, has noticed something cool on search results: buttons to vote on links, much like Digg or StumbleUpon. He sent some screenshots over to TechCrunch.
The feature is being "bucket tested," meaning it's likely been rolled out to a handful of random Google users. As TechCrunch points out, it's not the first time that Google has experimented with voting on links.
Google has put out some official words on the test: "This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes." Users can additionally suggest changes to search results, something that Google says may be shared with other users. The explanation added that users will probably only see this feature for a few weeks before it returns to the drawing board.
There's a Google FAQ for it too, explaining that the feature is called "Edit Search Results." And blogger Justin Hileman has posted a detailed account of his experiences with it.
Learning personal search preferences could not only help make results more relevant, but could also add to Google's vast library of personal data and preferences, potentially for ad-serving purposes. It could also be applied to other areas of search, like images, news, and video, which many critics argue are tougher to index by algorithm alone.
But this is interesting for another reason: the persistent rumors that Google might buy Digg and use its technology to breathe some new life into Google News, which hasn't been growing as quickly as some of the company's other products. If Pike's screenshots are any indicator, this may mean that Google has been working to build something similar in-house instead.
Still, let's not get ahead of ourselves: right now, it looks like just a way to shape personal search results. And an experimental one at that.
This post was updated at 8:40 a.m. PT.
Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.
Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.
StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.
Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.
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