The purchase of the financial site, Mint.com for $170 million, by Intuit, is one indication that valuations may start returning to some pre-crash levels for acquisitions. The sales price represents 17x of annual revenues of Mint.com Nice. Six months ago I was told people were selling domains with revenues for 2x. Yes I know Mint.com is an active site with over million users, but at its … [Read more...]

A news story that ran locally in Miami last night caught my eye. There is a video posted on YouTube showing a man drowning off the coast of Puerto Rico. The video is obviously quite upsetting to the family who lives in Miami who asked YouTube.com to remove it. "Stop using my Dad, leave my Dad alone, let him rest in peace", said the son in asking YouTube to remove the video. The family … [Read more...]

Any one with a Facebook, Myspace or Twitter account, (probably everyone who reads this blog, ) needs to read two recent posts on Mashable, about how tax authorities and burglars are both using social networking sites to find people to go after. The first Mashable post talks about how state tax authorities from several states, have been succesful in collecting back taxes from taxpayers using … [Read more...]

A employee of Microsoft, Michael Kordahi, has launched a "fun experiment",  side project to see how the three major search engines return results for the same keyword. He calls the service, "BlindSearch, the search engine taste test." ""The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive … [Read more...]

Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of comScore, said at the MediaPost OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference in San Francisco, Calif., Friday that advertisers should "Get rid of the click as the de facto standard to measure the success of an online campaign. It's outdated and doesn't represent real success. Instead Fulgoni says says advertisers and marketers need to forget the click, … [Read more...]

Amazon.com announced today that they bought online retailer Zappos.com for $847 Million,  in a stock and cash transaction. According to the press release, Amazon will assume all outstanding options and warrants of Zappos in exchange for approximately 10 million shares of Amazon common stock, equal to approximately $807 million based on the average closing price for the 45 … [Read more...]

TechCrunch published a blog post last night disclosing financial projections of Twitter, which it admitted was obtained by a an anonymous hacker which had gained "easy access" to hundreds of pieces of internal Twitter information, from pass codes to meeting minutes, and then forwarded the data to the news website. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for … [Read more...]