Years before Groupon was even in existence, back In October 2007 Microsfot shelled out a reported $50 Million Dollars for the Shopping site Jellyfish.com
Today the domain name doesn’t even resolve, unless as Mike below points out you type in the address as www.jellyfish.com.
If you type in just Jellyfish.com into your browser the domain does not resolve.
While this is an pretty programming basic, to allow resolution of a domain with the www. and without Microsoft seems to have forgotten it despite spending $50 Million to acquire this property just a few years ago.
With browsers getting smarter all the time, people are going to be typing the shorter version without the www into the broswer so its essential your domains resolve either way.
Now here for your general knowledge is some background on JellyFish.com
According to Wikipedia.org, “Jellyfish was the first website exclusively using “cost per action” for shopping, and the first to give ad revenues to customers, by means of rebates on purchases”
“Jellyfish launched the first beta version of service in June 2006, after receiving an initial seed round of investment from its founders, Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire, and Kegonsa Capital Partners.“
“In a press release, Kegonsa Capital Partners said that it acquired 25 percent of Jellyfish.com’s stock for about $600,000 in February 2006, and made 15 times its seed investment with the deal.“
“On October 2006, Jellyfish raised an additional 5 million dollars in funding. According to their founders, Jellyfish has 1,000 retailers advertising more than 5 million products”
“In an interview in July 2007, Wiegand said Jellyfish had sold nearly $5 million worth of products “
It does, and it doesn’t resolve, and this should be extremely embarassing to Microsoft!
If you go to http://www.jellyfish.com/ it resolves to http://www.bing.com/cashback – this I believe is what MS did with the Jellyfish product.
If you to to http://jellyfish.com it does not resolve!
This is probably the most basic of Web site setup, and MS botched it!
I remember when Jellyfish was around, and started here in Chicago. Good for the founders, bad for the buyer…
mp/m
Hi,
On kinda of a similar note:
At one point for over a year+… “Verizon” that owned a very close “type-0” domain to Verizon .com….had it where it did not “resolve” to any page at all (not with the “www.” or just the domain)…. I found that unbelievable.
I forget the exact domain name now, because this was back in like 2005/2006…but it was like verison .com or verzion .com
A lot of “type-in” traffic missed either way….
I even sent them an email telling them about it…and I received no reply and like I said the domain never resolved for about a year+…after I sent the email. I do not know how long before that it did not ‘resolve’…
I also think they had to get the domain through a WIPO filing…not 100% positive….but pretty sure…
If so, you would have thought if it was that important, they would have made sure the 1st thing they did…was have it pointed to their website.
Best,
Dan
First time in my life I have ever heard of Jellyfish.com, and I’ve been in the”online world” for a long time now. I may only be a domainer since 2007, but I’ve been avid online since 1997.
So $50M and I’m just hearing about it now, in regards to this post? What is MS doing with their money?
Hi JP,
“So $50M and I’m just hearing about it now, in regards to this post? What is MS doing with their money?”
____
Buying 1.6% in Facebook for 240 million dollars in 2007…when most everyone, especially most “domainners”…thought they were crazy…a few exceptions… (Snappy)
That valued Facebook then at: 15 Billion
Guesstimates Value now: 40 -65 Billion
By the time they do an IPO…over 100 Billion (IMHO)
Turns out, even when MS does something “right”… they still get it somewhat wrong….they should have bought 5%-10+% ( I know ‘hindsight’ is 20/20)
Peace to all,
Dan
Jellyfish was a company bought by MS, and their domain name was jellyfish.com. I was incorrect in saying they were from Chicago when they were from Wisconsin – I heard about them at a tech event in Chicago.
They were an existing company, and after MS bought the company (and the domain name) I am not exactly sure what they did with them, but it appears the either some or none of the functionality is rolled into Bing, and the domain name redirects to Bing.
mp/m