Bobshop.nl sold?

It seems that pure online player Bobshop.nl is bought by brick and mortar company Scheer & Foppen (55 offline shops). The website of Scheer & Foppen certainly does not indicate that they have taken Internet very serious. Let’s hope that with this take-over they will enter a new phase in their Internet aspirations.

Congratulations to Bob and his team!

UPDATE: the news has been confirmed by Emerce

Microsoft betters offer of Quadrangle to buy Ciao

Microsoft has agreed to buy Greenfield Online, owner of European price comparison website ciao.com, for about $486 million to boost its Internet search and e-commerce business in Europe. Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo earlier this year failed after a protracted battle, said on Friday the acquisition should benefit its Live Search platform. Microsoft also bought Jellyfish some time ago, which they integrated into their Product Search. This is the second sign that Microsoft is really acting on what their were saying a year ago (read my post on that).

Microsoft’s vice president for Windows and online services, Tami Reller about Ciao:

The team at Ciao has built a passionate consumer community based on intuitive technology and extensive merchant relationships that we believe will deliver incremental benefit to the Microsoft Live Search platform.

Ciao.com offers advice on purchases, mainly of consumer electronics, and encourages users to join a network of shopping experts to share opinions. It makes its revenues from e-commerce, merchant referrals and advertising sales.

Microsoft’s offer of $17.50 per share betters an earlier proposal by media-focused U.S. buyout firm Quadrangle Group (read my former post on this) to acquire the company for $15.50 a share, and represents a slight premium to Greenfield’s closing price of $17.25 on Thursday. On August 26, Greenfield had said it had received a $17.50 per share offer but did not reveal from whom. The latest offer represents a premium of about 10 percent over Greenfield’s closing share price on August 25.

Microsoft said it had agreed to sell off Greenfield Online’s main business, which surveys consumer opinion online and sells the results to market researchers, to an unnamed financial buyer. The companies expect both deals to close during the fourth quarter of 2008. Completion of the Greenfield sale to Microsoft does not depend on Microsoft’s disposal of the online survey business, the two companies said.

Rambler Media fully acquires Price.ru

Rambler Media Ltd., operating one of Russia’s most popular internet brands, has exchanged contracts for the acquisition of the remaining 49% of Price Express LLC (price.ru), a leading Russian product comparison internet service. Rambler already held a 51% stake in Price Express, which it acquired in January 2006. The transaction is expected to be completed in July 2008 upon regulatory approval.

Price.ru is currently the second largest price comparison site in Russia and generated revenues of approximately US$3.2 million in 2007. Price.ru will continue to be operated as an independent brand, but will be increasingly integrated into Rambler’s services.

Mark Opzoomer, Chief Executive Officer of Rambler Media, commented: “The decision to increase our ownership in Price Express reflects our determination to continue to rationalize our product portfolio by either consolidating or divesting operations where we own less than 100%. This process will enable us to optimize our legal structure while focusing on the best services for our users and advertisers. Online comparison shopping and product searches have become increasingly popular in Russia and we believe that owning 100% of Price Express will create more value for our shareholders.”

Microsoft reviving Live Search for products?

According to Liveside.net Microsoft has just launched a brand new page for product search. Microsoft hasn’t improved product search for quite some time, so this might be a sign that they are taking this more seriously. In a previous post I mentioned that Steve Balmer acknowledged the importance of comparison shopping. He also said that they should be able to generate 25% in advertising.

Currently the Live Search for Products doesn’t work, which is pretty silly. Every search results in the following message:

Sorry, we did not find any product results for this search.

If Live Search for Products actually works then it would look like the image below. You are now able to refine the search results by user opinions, brands, category, and price range. Liveside.net concluded that in comparison to the old product search, search results have improved dramatically. Other improvements, although available before as part of the Shopping Search vertical already, include the ability to compare prices and view user ratings and reviews.

The new look of Product Search:

Let’s see if Microsoft will integrate other features soon. I still expect some kind of integration of Jellyfish in their Product Search.

Atomico to invest 300 million in Europe

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have a big appetite for success. When they sold Skype to eBay they cashed several hundred millions, but they invested quite a substantial part in their investment vehicle Atomico.

Currently they are planning to open a new fund, but now entitely focused on European startups. The fund will have a size of 300 million euros. Atomico’s first fund consists of a lot of well-known names like LastFM, Powerreviews, Technorati, Joost and Wunderloop. Of these, LastFM was recently sold to CBS for around 280 million dollars. It seems that everything Niklas and Janus touch turns into gold. They also were involved in the file sharing program Kazaa. So, if you are a startup and need funding to make the next step I would go for Atomico. Hopefully they will like your business too

High activity in The Netherlands

It’s difficult to keep track of all merger and acquisition activity in The Netherlands. There is no common underlying trigger for the frenzy. For some it has to do with (re)focussing on their core activity, others just want to expand and others are acquired by even larger retailers. Below a short summary of all recent activity:

- The Phone House takes over Typhone, Femmefone en ICTango
- Venture Capitalist Ende & Deitmers buys 30% of Centralpoint
- Takeitnow has been bought by Aces Direct
- First Europa is up for sale
- Venture Capitalist Ende & Deitmers invests in Hyves

I will keep you all updated on any new acitivity!

Is ‘green’ a hype or there to stay?

In October last year I already wrote about CSE’s launching theme pages focused on the ‘green trend‘.

More and more comparison engines are leveraging their (costly) software to add new ‘niche’ or theme sites, like Shopgreen (from Pricegrabber) and TheFindGreen (from TheFind) [......] I expect many more of these theme sites to pop-up, but with Al Gore pushing for a better climate, for now the green trend will be the most prevailing one.

Well, it didn’t take long. The first real green and environmental conscious CSE is out, Greenzer. At the closing of Earth day Greenzer.com lauchned their public beta. Greenzer highlights some of the key green attributes for products to make the search easier and more informative. They also provide a score for a certain brand/product.

The Greenzer score is built up out of 4 elements:

• A Climate Counts score
• A Greenpeace score
• EPEAT score
• Energy Star certification

In the case of the Toshiba Tecra notebook this leads to a score of 8.6. See the image below!

Greenzer.com has a nice look-and-feel. I also believe that the ‘green’ element will attract quite a few visitors. However, they will also have to provide an excellent selection of shops. I am curious if they will also only admit ‘green’ shops. That is something that I did not see yet. Maybe something for the next release!

Take-over wrap-up

Today Checkit, a Dutch searchengine marketing company, has been taken over by Isobar (a Aegis Media company).

Also announced today is the take-over of Indextools by Yahoo. The acquisition includes IndexTools’ Web analytics business and technology as well as its Tensa R&D Kft. subsidiary. Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools’ assets is intended to expand Yahoo!’s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients’ online marketing efforts. Read the whole press release here.

Google to improve Amazon Webservices?

It was being rumored all over the web but the news is now out… Google just launched its Google App Engine. This is an ambitious new Google project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services (source: Techcrunch).

Werner Vogels (see my post) also hinted about this in his keynote speach at the Next Web Conference. Actually Google App Engine can be seen as a direct competitor of Amazon Webservices, offering S3, EC2 and SimpleDB.

This is wat Google says about their own service:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

Reporting about The Next Web Conference

First of all, it was a really great and very inspiring event. Best thing, I didn’t even have to travel far as it was in Amsterdam. I will sure be present at future editions.

I was there only on Friday, so hereby a short recap of this conference.

1. First keynote speach: Robert Scoble

I funny guy who really must have nothing else to do then be connected and online 24/7. He, however, opened my eyes about the fact that by ‘using’ other peoples knowlegde, you become even more knowlegdeable. And for that, you must know who is important and relevant on the Internet (or your area of expertise) and who is not.
His main point was that social services should make the first impression compelling and rich. I cannot agree more. The first impression you get went you enter LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace or Pownce are not the best onces.. You really have to put in a lot of time to come up to speed.

Good presentation (not the best one I have seen, but hey).

Links he mentioned: Friendfeed, Upcoming, Twitter and many more… (all probably sponsored)

2. Six startup pitches

I am not going to do extra work here… Techcrunch made a good analysis of all these pitches. Read them here.

3. Second keynote speach: Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com. His presentation was about ‘uncertainty’. I must say it wasn’t a really compelling speach. Werner told a lot of stuff which is true, but not new. A large part was also about the webservices Amazon.com offers (like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2). His claim was that start-ups should not waste valuable money on services they could also buy from Amazon at a fairly low rate. Although that makes sense, this speach did not do it for me. I hope that Amazon paid The Next Web to be here as a keynote speaker

Links he mentioned: Amazon Webservices, Create server farms (Scalr)

4. Third keynote speaker: Garrett Camp

Really the best speach of the day. Garret is founder and chief architect StumbleUpon.com. His presentation was about “The Future of Search and Discovery”. Just too much to tell here in short, I will probably spend a new blogpost on this matter. Main thing for me was the distinction between ‘search’ and ‘discovery’.

Search: people know exactly what they are looking for
Discovery: people want to be entertained or do not really know what they want

Obviously StumbleUpon has everything to do with discovery. The company I currently work for is more into ‘search’ (price comparison). But we certainly must make more room for discovery as well.

Links he mentioned: Piclens, Mahalo, Wikia Search, Powerset

5. Six startup pitches (round 2)

Again, go to Techcrunch for a good analysis of all these pitches. Read them here.

6. Fourth keynote speaker: Jessica May

Arghh. I am very sorry but this speach was the worst of the day. Jessica pointed out a lot of true things ( people wanting to receive good recommendations once they bought something, everything is about me, personalize, etc. etc.), but she did not come up with any solution or best practises (except for showing the recommendations of Amazon… yeah great). Recommendating stuff is probably the most difficult thing to be solved and everybody knows that. Moods of people change, people change, people’s life changes, people get in different stages (kid, student, parent, etc.).

Netflix is trying to solve this with a contest, but even a lot of universities and commercial companies are not able to beat there own built ranking by more than 10%. That says it all.

Links she mentioned: mmm, cannot remember any..

7. Last keynote speaker: Chris Saad

Chris is Co-Founder and Chairperson at DataPortability.org and CEO of Faraday Media. Also Co-Founder at Media 2.0 Workgroup and APML Workgroup. A good speach and very interesting as well. He did not really tell anything new, but it was nice to hear him advocate data portability and data operability. Great initiative and I wish him all the best and a lot of support.

After this I left (had to be home on time to pick up the kids). I had a great day, met a lot people and interesting start-ups. I will certainly give a few of them a call!

Finally a few tips for the Next Web Conference:

• Please provide a shuttle bus service next time (Amsterdam CS to Westergasfabriek)
• If you want to promote networking, make the badge readable!! I now had to get into people’s personal space to read from which company they were.
• Provide some sort of system so that the audience can ‘press fast forward’ or ‘get off the podium’. Especially for the pitches of the start-ups. Some were really lousy…