IAC-owned Match.com this morning announced that it has acquired a 20% interest in Zhenai, a provider of “online matchmaking services” in China, for an undisclosed sum.
Launched in 2005 by CEO Dr. Song Li, Zhenai provides integrated Internet and telephone matchmaking services to Chinese singles looking for long-term relationships. Zhenai is said to boast a user base of over 30 million registered members. → Read More
Online dating site OkCupid is making a big move today in the mobile space—the service is adding location-based functionality to its Android and iOS mobile apps. For background, OkCupid singles tend to be younger, which is one of the reasons why IAC’s Match.com decided to buy the dating startup for $50 million earlier this year.
The use of mobile apps for dating and even meeting friends is definitely on the rise, and it seems that the future of this industry could lie in mobile platforms. Co-founder Sam Yagan agrees, and says that Grindr, a dating app for Gay men, helped pioneer this. But there’s still room left for innovation in other markets, he says. → Read More
IAC has had an agreement with Google for some time now to hand over all search advertising on Ask.com and other IAC sites to the search giant. In 2007, IAC extended the deal, which was worth $3.5 billion at the time, to end in 2012. According to a release issued this morning, IAC and Google has renewed and extended the agreement through March 31, 2016.
According to the release, the agreement, through which Google provides IAC’s search products and network partners with sponsored listings and other search-related services, is comparable to the previous agreement. → Read More
IAC has made a business out of developing or acquiring mobile applications based on its popular properties. In fact, IAC’s mobile apps, which include apps for Match.com, CityGrid, UrbanSpoon, and Dictionary.com, have seen over 40 million downloads as of end of the year 2010. Today, we’ve learned exclusively that IAC is furthering its mobile strategy by launching Hatch Labs, a technology sandbox devoted to incubating mobile startups and innovations.
Hatch Labs is the brainchild of Dinesh Moorjani, who was formerly the SVP of IAC Mobile. At IAC, Moorjani started the mobile group in 2007 and helped lead all product strategy for mobile. During his time, Moorjani helped doubled mobile revenue annually for IAC. He tells us that for the past five years IAC has been acquiring mobile technologies and apps, but this can be an expensive endeavor. Moorjani and the company wanted to help incubate more innovation within IAC, particularly in the mobile sector and thus Hatch Labs was born. → Read More
IAC has expanded its board of directors with a thirteenth seat and elected well-known businessman Michael Eisner, who served as chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 1984 until 2005, to join said board, effective immediately.
Prior to his long tenure at Disney, Michael Eisner served as the President of Paramount for eight years after starting his career at ABC. In fact, he was hired at ABC by none other than Barry Diller, until recently chief executive at IAC. → Read More
Big move for Liberty Media, IAC and the latter’s Barry Diller today. The former has exchanged its entire equity stake in the Internet holding company for a combination of assets and cash in a transaction intended to be tax-free to both companies. Liberty has exchanged approximately 12.8 million shares of IAC stock for all of the capital stock of a wholly-owned subsidiary of IAC that holds the Evite and Gifts.com businesses, and approximately $220 million in cash.
Barry Diller is also stepping down as IAC’s CEO, and will be replaced by Greg Blatt, formerly chief executive of IAC portfolio company Match.com. → Read More
After a series of on-again, off-again talks, Newsweek is merging with The Daily Beast, the IAC-owned online news site run by Tina Brown. The new joint venture will take the ungainly name of the Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Last August, the Washington Post Company sold Newsweek for $1, plus the assumption of $40 million in debt, to stereo tycoon Sydney Harman.
Now Barry Diller is getting his hands on Newsweek and mashing it together with his high-profile media play, the Daily Beast. It sounds as though the two publications will remain separate for now, with Tina Brown becoming the editor in chief of Newsweek as well. That makes sense. Who wants to read the Daily Beast in print? It is like the TMZ of news. → Read More
The saga continues. After informing us in September that the IAC-owned Bloglines was to be shut down permanently, Ask.com (the IAC property that operates Bloglines) has resurrected the troubled RSS feeder, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. IAC has transferred ownership of the property to an unlikely new patron: MerchantCircle, an online marketing network for small business owners. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we do know that the deal was sort of in the family—IAC invested in MerchantCircle back in 2007. We are told Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service until December 1 of this year, after which the service will be transitioned to MerchantCircle. → Read More
Barry Diller realizes that his Ask search engine isn’t going to gain market share anytime soon, but search can still power growth for IAC if it just keeps up with the growth in the overall search market. IAC released third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were up 25 percent to $422 million. Operating income quadrupled to $36 million, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.32 versus Wall Street estimates of $0.27. (However, after stripping out the adjustments due to one-time sales of stock and other assets a year ago, net income was actually down 19 percent).
Search represented nearly half of revenues ($205 million). The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon, but those searches tend to generate lower revenue per query than those on Ask.com, which itself is still growing and is now ranked as the sixth largest website in the U.S. LAst month, Ask CityGrid Media’s new local advertising network also contributed to overall search revenues. → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
On stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, recalled a story from the days when he backed Excite, one of the original Internet portals. Specifically, he spoke briefly about the time they failed to acquire Google.
This story has been circulated for a while, but not many people know about it. Khosla stated it simply: Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars, but Excite didn’t want to buy them. → Read More
Many of us may have forgotten that Ask.com is a search engine just like Google and Bing. It seems that IAC’s Barry Diller, who owns Ask.com, seems to have no memory of Ask’s value as well. Diller sat down with Michael Arrington today at TechCrunch Disrupt, and spoke candidly about the future of Ask.com.
Says Diller, “I don’t think Ask.com is going to gain search share; everyone copied us.” He added that Ask is not competitive with Google at all. When an audience member asked whether Ask would be more valuable outside of IAC rather than within the network; Diller quipped: Ask has no value inside of IAC, so why would it add value as a standalone site? He also said that IAC hasn’t been able to grown Ask the way he thought the company would be able to. → Read More
It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. Bloglines, which is actually operated by IAC Q&A property Ask.com, will be informing users of the news today and will officially be shut down on October 1.
Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. While we’ve heard in the past that IAC was considering shutting down the site, the company held off on killing the site permanently and was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines. → Read More
Recently soft-launched by CollegeHumor Media (aka Connected Ventures), the IAC company is today formally introducing the latest addition to its ever-expanding network of funny websites.
Meet Dorkly.com, a new videogame humor property that caters to “all gamers, be they nerds, geeks, or even dweebs”. That sounds like you, so we thought we’d share. → Read More
Dailyburn, formerly known as Gyminee, a social network for fitness and diet tracking, online accountability, and motivation, has been sold. IAC has acquired a majority stake in the company for an undisclosed sum.
DailyBurn will become part of IAC’s Mindspark Interactive Network, which is also is home to social and entertainment destinations like Zwinky, IWON and Girlsense, personal interest sites such as Life123 and Excite, and interactive products such as Webfetti, My Fun Cards and Smiley Central. → Read More
Before there was even an App Store, I knew there was something to UrbanSpoon. Several million downloads and a sale to IAC later, I can safely say I was right. Now the team behind it is trying to capture the magic all over again with its new free iPad app.
On the face of it, UrbanSpoon for the iPad may not seem as useful as it is for the iPhone. After all, most people don’t just whip out their iPad on the street when they’re looking for a restaurant (though some may when the 3G version hits, who knows). But plenty of dinner choices are made right before you leave the house — and that’s what UrbanSpoon for the iPad is perfect for. → Read More
There’s no denying it. People love to shake their iPhones. It’s almost as if they want to see how much they can shake it before it breaks. But shaking it is half the fun, especially when apps take advantage of the built-in accelerometer to turn shaking into a feature. One of the earliest apps to make shaking a central element of its interface was Urbanspoon, the restaurant recommender. You shake the slot-machine inspired app to find nearby restaurants.
Since launching in the summer of 2008, Urbanspoon’s iPhone app has been shaken more than half a billion times. The app has been installed more than 9 million times, and continues to be popular (currently it is the No. 5 most popular free app in the Travel category, right after Yelp). → Read More
As you know, today is Valentine’s Day. As such, I thought it was the perfect time to write a love sonnet for my new favorite company: Expedia.com. Actually, I’ll do the opposite.
Seeing as it’s a long weekend in the United States (President’s Day is on Monday), I decided I was going to set up a little trip to get away with the girl I’m seeing. A few weeks ago, I set up all the plans for what I thought would be a nice, relaxing weekend. It’s actually been anything but relaxing. My mistake? Using Expedia to book it. → Read More
