StumbleUpon is preparing to launch a shortURL service (a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs, like TinyURL or Bit.ly) in the next couple of weeks called su.pr.
Founder Garrett Camp announced the new service on Twitter without any description of what it might be on March 3. In an email exchange he says it will be a shortURL service to share StumbleUpon links on… → Read More
A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.
Then there is… → Read More
Mixx is steadily growing, and they’re hoping to spur even greater traffic increases with a completely revamped website. But every social news service is showing growth, and Mixx actually appears to be lagging if you compare publicly available data.
Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more… → Read More
In other Mozilla news, Firefox hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years.
Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox. → Read More
Deutsche Bank is still out there trying to find a buyer for eBay’s StumbleUpon business, we’ve heard from new sources (we first reported on this on September 18). But there’s one problem: while eBay wants to unload the business, they aren’t willing to sell it for less than $75 million, the price they paid for it in May 2007.
StumbleUpon’s 2008 revenues are estimated to be $6 million or so.
eBay… → Read More
Israeli blogger Tal Siach, one of the authors of the Walyou blog, seems to be one of the few people who can actually access the new, toolbar-free version of StumbleUpon. The new version was set to launch to everyone on Wednesday, but so far everyone I’ve spoken with is still on the old design, which requires the downloaded toolbar to function properly. Lucky for us, though, Tal is in, and wrote a… → Read More
Recommendation engine StumbleUpon has been facing some tough times lately: earlier this month we reported that eBay was looking to sell the startup less than 18 months after acquiring it (the company refuses to comment). And its traffic has been showing signs of stagnation (though the number of registered users to steadily rise). But tonight, the site is launching a new feature that may very… → Read More
In May 2007 eBay acquired website recommendation engine StumbleUpon for $75 million. Now, less than a year and a half later, they’re trying to unload it according to a source with knowledge of the sale process.
eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to find the right buyer, says our source, but the asking price is unknown. It’s not certain that eBay will be able to sell it for the price they paid – In July… → Read More
Sometime today, StumbleUpon will register its five millionth user. (At the time of this writing, it is at 4,994,826 registered users). That number is kind of meaningless, though, because it counts anyone who has ever registered for the Website-rating and discovery service, and who may no longer use it. StumbleUpon, which is part of eBay, does not disclose how many active users it has. But it did… → Read More
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel. TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn… → Read More
Subvert And Profit is a service that lets users pay to get their sites on Digg (and more recently StumbleUpon). Unlike Pay Per Post, the company doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to spin their business into something socially acceptable. People pay them to pollute big social sites and get traffic, and they’re ok with being slammed for that. As long as they make money. The whole… → Read More
If you are one of the 3.7 million people who have downloaded the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser, you may have noticed that whenever a Website that’s been “stumbled” comes up in a Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live search, the StumbleUpon icon and its star ratings appear right beside the link in the results page. (A page that’s been “stumbled” means that a… → Read More
As we expected earlier today, eBay has confirmed an all cash $75 million acquisition of social discovery service StumbleUpon. eBay says StumbleUpon fits will with their “goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust” and helps them learn more about newly emerging community based businesses. Although you can imagine “StumbleUpon Shopping” coming… → Read More
I’m hearing that the eBay/StumbleUpon acquisition will be officially announced sometime today – almost certainly at the end of trading. Keep an eye our for the press release. We originally broke this rumor in April when a term sheet was reportedly signed. The Wall Street Journal picked up the story earlier this month. I don’t know if the price will be disclosed, or if the rumors… → Read More
First reported here at TechCrunch on April 18, eBay is now said to be close to finalizing its deal to acquire StumbleUpon for $75 million, according to a new online report from the Wall Street Journal. The high flying startup has been rumored to be in acquisition talks since November . The Wall Street Journal report quotes an insider saying that no final agreement has been reached and that talks… → Read More
This morning we wrote about StumbleUpon’s site specific stumbling and Rafe Needleman’s idea of having a button on blogs that pulls up a random article. I pinged WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (TechCrunch runs on WordPress) after the post and asked him if anyone has created a plugin for WordPress that does this. They hadn’t, so Matt wrote one and published it. The plugin is… → Read More
The most recent StumbleUpon Toolbar (v. 3.05) includes a new feature called StumbleThru, which allows users to stay on a specific web site while stumbling through pages that they might enjoy. Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, WordPress, The Onion, and CNN are some of the sites currently enabled (as are the .edu and .gov domain names). It’s a cool way to find those YouTube videos or Onion… → Read More
On the same day that the news breaks that eBay is acquiring StumbleUpon for $40ish million, Google announces that they are building strikingly similar functionality into their Toolbar. Google (along with AOL) were reportedly in the running to acquire StumbleUpon until very recently. The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon. Click it and you’ll be taken to a new website that Google thinks… → Read More
High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 – $75 million. (update: GigaOm… → Read More
. The service provides an innovative way for users of the system to discover a wide array of video content without using additional hardware. StumbleUpon VP of Marketing, David Feller says: “Both the video game industry and online video have been experiencingexplosive growth. By customizing our Stumble Video platform, we’re giving Wii gamers another gateway to discover new and… → Read More
StumbleUpon’s social browsing application has been such a big hit that the company is launching a separate site for video referral called StumbleVideo. StumbleUpon is a browser toolbar that recommends Web sites based on viewing patterns of other people with similar user profiles. StumbleVideo will do the same type of recommending for video, only it is not a browser extension. It is a Web… → Read More
Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million. The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped – one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not… → Read More
The wildly popular Firefox extension StumbleUpon released this morning a toolbar for Internet Explorer users. The service lets you browse around web sites that have been recommended by friends and other users with interests similar to your own. Users can also write reviews of sites. The end result is a very compelling user experience that’s likely to explode now that it’s working with… → Read More
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