alarm:clock

- Thursday, November 6, 2008

JS-Kit Continues Its Rise To Power In The Commenting World By Acquiring CoComment

alarm:clock has learned that comment aggregator CoComment is being acquired by JS-Kit, the rising force in blog commenting world. While terms of the deal have yet to be announced, there has to be more stock than dollars being exchanged as JS-Kit only raised $3.6m in a Series B round last month. CoComment had raised $5.6m in funding from SwissCom of Zurich with NetAge in Japan also kicking in a few dollars to help the company reach its goal of monetizing online conversations. But aside from a few low-brow ads on their site, we don't think the company was even close to making serious coin. That probably didn't help their failed efforts to raise another round this year. Compounding their problems was SwissCom's own financial issues which didn't put them in a position to throw more money at the company. And that's too bad as CoComment entertained us with promotions featuring Marina from "Hot For Words" while offering a useful way to track comments. The few current CoComment employees in the U.S. (their headquarters is in Switzerland) are being offered jobs at JS-Kit or are being shown the door without a severance package. No word yet on what CEO Matt Colbourne will be doing but we doubt JS-Kit will offer him a job that will pay him enough to live in Switzerland, especially considering that JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, a maker of interactive widgets for blogs, back in July. If JS-Kit can figure out a way to make a profit in the future, we'll happily comment about it.