Communicate.com, a public company in Vancouver, Canada, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator startup Auctomatic this morning for $5 million in cash and stock. The company is also changing its name to Live Current Media, Inc. Communicate/Live Current is in the domain name business – their primary assets are 800 high value domains (perfume.com, cricket.com, etc.) that generate a variety of advertising and affiliate fee revenues. The company’s market cap is just shy of $60 million. That stock price has increased by around 250% in the last year. Some of those domain names are quite valuable. The company declined to sell cricket.com for $6 million earlier this year, for example. About 40 of the company’s 800 domain names are “very high quality” CEO Geoffrey Hampson told me in an interview last week. The company is going to focus on building out branded properties around those domain names, Hampson said, starting with Perfume.com. The Auctomatic shopping engine technology will be a big part of the push, and the company will also add social features over time. Demand Media is another domain name holder that is trying to create new revenue streams around domains sitting in inventory. Last year they launched a semi-distributed social network called me.tv to spur the purchase of .tv domain names. No word on how that project is doing. Will this work? I don’t know and I’m not even sure I’ll remember to check in on them. The domain business is a cash cow but isn’t exactly exciting stuff. Hopefully the Auctomatic founders, who must leave Silicon Valley and move to Vancouver as part of the transaction, will be able to pry themselves loose at some point in the future and start another company. For now, though, congratulations to them. And to their backers, Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. CrunchBase Information Live Current Media Auctomatic Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
After Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Y Combinator funded Reddit, people took notice. This wasn’t just some quirky incubator where they gave college students a few bucks to kick start their new companies (although it is that, too – their standard deal is $5000 + $5000 per founder, for 6%ish of the company) – real products were coming out of Y Combinator, and people started to notice. Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below. Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode: Zenter Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show. Weebly Weebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here. Virtualmin Virtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device. Octopart Vertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal → Read More
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