Copy, Paste, Get Acquired: Mister Wong Buys FreundeNews

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... → Learn More

Construktiv, the company behind social bookmarking service Mister Wong and Lifestream.fm, has acquired FreundeNews, a German service blatantly modeled and designed after the example of FriendFeed (the startup was actually called FreundeFeed when it first launched in April 2008 but changed its name sometime after, most probably in fear of sparking a trademark dispute).

Let’s hope this isn’t an encouragement to copy/paste innovation, althought Construktiv is most likely simply doing this to clear the path for their lifestreaming service Lifestream.fm to become the only relevant one in Germany. Although the deal terms remain undisclosed, we believe that it was rather small in size; we’re told FreundeNews usage was relatively low in the country and the founders were keen on pursuing other ventures.

The users that did engage with the web service have 4 weeks to transition to Lifestream.fm, starting today.

(Hat tip to Netzwertig)

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