Founder and investor Joshua Schachter has spent a great deal of time trying to solve the problem of not being able to easily find relevant things and people; initially with his first startup Delicious — which he sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million — and now with his latest efforts at incubator Tasty Labs. Tasty Labs, which has $3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, launched its first project (Jig) in August and has now come through with its second service, Skills.to. → Read More
Delicious has just announced 4 new features to make its stacks, or collections of links, more social. Because the only thing better than a bundle of your favorite kitten websites is bundle co-created by you and your friends. You can now collaboratively build stacks, comment on whole stacks, respond to a stack with a stack similar to a YouTube response, and create private stacks. The features will permit new use cases like stealth cooperation and give Delicious an advantage over Pinterest which doesn’t offer private boards yet.
→ Read More
AVOS, the startup behind the newly re-launched Delicious.com, has acquired the link-saving service Trunk.ly, the company announced in a blog post this afternoon. AVOS, which is led by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, says that Trunk.ly’s “technology and insights will accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious.”
→ Read More
AVOS has been getting a whole lot of criticism by former Delicious users and fans – and even original founder Joshua Schachter – after the recent launch of the all-new Delicious. And granted, perhaps they would have been better off waiting a couple more months before launching.
But AVOS quickly moved to fix some issues, and announced that it was working on fixing others. → Read More
Million dollar question is not: will you use the revamped social bookmarking service? But rather, will your mom, sister, and that dorky teenage kid from across the street use it?
As you may have heard, Delicious was saved from Yahoo’s incompetent hands by AVOS, the new startup created by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in April 2011.
Today, AVOS is relaunching Delicious, which they say was “rebuilt from the ground up”. → Read More
Yahoo has finally found a buyer for long suffering Delicious. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the company, says Yahoo, via a “new Internet company, AVOS.” We’re still gathering details, but here’s the official stuff: → Read More
The Delicious saga continues … In reaction to what many have thought to be Yahoo’s mismanagement of the popular bookmarking service Delicious in the past couple of months, many people have tried to roll their own Delicious importers in hopes of taking advantage of the traffic exodus. Google too has today rolled out a Delicious migration tool for Google Bookmarks, to give people who were scared of the demise of Delicious a safe haven for their meticulously curated links. → Read More
It looks like Yahoo has been looking for a home for Delicious for some time now. On his Diggnation web show this week, Digg founder Kevin Rose said that Yahoo contacted Digg to see if the company would be interested in taking over Delicious prior to when an internal slide leaked indicating Yahoo wanted to get rid if it and before the December layoffs (which would put the time period at early December/late November). In the video, Rose addresses this around the 36 minute mark.
Rose said that at first he thought that Yahoo was trying to sell Delicious off (which is what we assumed as well), but then realized that Yahoo was simply trying to find a home for the bookmarking service. Rose confirmed that Yahoo and Digg had preliminary talks simply about how much it would cost for the upkeep of Delicious. → Read More
When word got out two weeks ago that Yahoo is not 100% committed to Delicious, people who still use the bookmarking service started to panic and look for alternatives. One competing bookmarking site that some people turned to is Pinboard, a barebones bookmarking site which looks a lot like Delicious did in its early years: lean, no-frills, and very useful. The company saw an influx of traffic and activity. The chart above shows requests per minute to its servers in the three days following the Delicious news compared to the week before.
A couple hour ago, Pinboard Tweeted out a link to the chart: → Read More
On December 16 Yahoo accidentally told the world they were shutting down popular bookmarking site Delicious. They fired most or all of the Delicious staff. Then they untold that story, saying they intended to sell it off and that the press got it all wrong.
Ok great. So how’s that sale process going?
Not so well, according to a handful of interested buyers I’ve spoken with. I know of five companies and venture firms that have reached out to Yahoo to talk about buying Delicious. Three of them have confirmed to me that Yahoo either hasn’t responded, or hasn’t responded with any serious level of engagement. According to one source, Yahoo has told people that they are planning on starting a sale process in mid-January. → Read More
Yahoo, which earned $1.6 billion in revenue last quarter, is “sunsetting” Delicious because the unprofitable acquisition “is not a strategic fit“. The tech and blogger community, along with Delicious fans, are crying ‘no.’ Michael Arrington says Yahoo is in “absolute disarray“. Even though Yahoo’s Delicious home page says it’s “the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe”, many most internet users have probably never heard of the social bookmarking site. So, what’s the big deal? Forget all the PR blunders for a moment and the significant damage its done to consumer confidence. Here’s why it matters.
Delicious was one of the first exciting Web 2.0 companies. A product that could help the Web 1.0 portals, like Yahoo and AOL, evolve and take advantage of the soon-to-be tsunami of social. Techcrunch wrote “Yahoo, in addition to launching a flurry of new products in the last few months (and the pace seems to be accelerating), now owns the two most important tagging properties on the web – flickr and del.icio.us.” → Read More
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper.
Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. → Read More
For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others.
In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier. → Read More
I’ve often found myself countering the argument that the Internet is making us dumber by citing Google as a second brain: the search engine lets us remember stuff that we didn’t actually know, which is sort of true as connectivity becomes ubiquitous. But what if there was a service designed specifically to retrieve information that we have already come across but didn’t explicitly log for future use, perhaps because at the time it didn’t seem relevant or useful.
At a higher level, that’s the concept behind Sentimnt, a personal and social search engine that at its simplest aims to answer the question: “Where did I read that?”. It does this by connecting to a user’s Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail and Delicious accounts, indexing all of the updates, articles, and resources that are referenced so that they can be recalled later.
The site is in private beta but TechCrunch Europe has invites (see below). → Read More
I’ve spoken to four different investors over the last two weeks trying to get at least a small piece of an angel financing round being quietly pitched by Delicous founder Joshua Schachter. He’s raising just $1 – $2 million, we’ve heard, at a valuation that may be as high as $15 million.
Schachter sold Delicious, one of the definitive startups that re-energized the consumer Internet sector in 2004-2005, to Yahoo in 2005. He left Yahoo in 2008, and joined Google in 2009. He left Google earlier this year.
Entrepreneurs like Schachter are highly valued by investors. The success rate of repeat entrepreneurs higher than first timers. And one potential investor put it succinctly – “Even if the company fails, someone will buy it just to get Schachter. There’s no way we lose our money.” → Read More
We just came across Packrati.us, a simple bookmarking service that allows you to essentially sync your Twitter feed with your Delicious bookmarks. Once you sign up with you Twitter and Delicious accounts, Packrati will follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, the site will add them to your Delicious.com bookmarks.
You can also bookmark URLs in @replies to you. In your Delicious account, the service will include any hashtags you include as tags for your bookmark and include the full text of the tweet in the bookmark comments. Here’s an example of the White House Twitter account’s tweeted URLs in Delicious, using Packrati’s tool. → Read More
Twones started life as a FriendFeed-type service that aggregated various music services into a single stream, which we dubbed a social music feed when we first caught wind of it.
Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn’t play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back.
The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it’s Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music. → Read More
Man-dinga would you look at all them hot dogs? The 4-in-1 Hotdog Maker leverages the wonderment of technology to not only cook what appears to be at least a few days’ worth of nutritious hot dogs, but also popcorn and hard-boiled eggs to boot. It’s a hot dog maker, steamer, egg boiler and popcorn maker in one! No fat or oil is required, so it’s a healthier way to cook. Also includes warming spikes for hot dog buns. Plugs into standard outlet. It’s a healthier way to cook! Did you read that part? Maybe I’ll go on an all hot dog, eggs, and popcorn diet and see how much weight I can drop by Memorial Day. 4 IN 1 HOTDOG MAKER [Spillsbury Specialty Toys] via Nerd Approved → Read More
This, my friends, is a poorly named product. But you know what they say; you can’t judge a donut making machine by its ridiculous hyphen-happy name. → Read More
About a month ago, I received an e-mail from a PR guy asking me if I’d like to try the Clear2O Water Pitcher, a Brita-style water filter for your fridge. Having just moved into a new apartment sans Brita, I jumped on the opportunity and requested a unit. Then on Monday of this week, a package came. I opened it up and lo and behold, it was the Clear2O. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
