July 31, 2007
SEM Firm iCrossing Buys Web Builder Proxicom
Arizona-based SEM giant iCrossing has bought Proxicom for an un-disclosed amount from Gores Technology. The deal was financed by a funding round last week by iCrossing where it raised $62M from Goldman Sachs and some VC firms.
Now iCrossing says it is buying Proxicom and with it $100M in annual revenue, as well as 500+ people in 12 offices. This will more double iCrossing's size and enable it to go public earlier.
As Marketing Pilgrim reports, "iCrossing’s acquisition of Proxicom is a watershed moment in the SEM industry. To date, most SEM firms have been acquired by marketing services or web agencies, but this is the first case where a major SEM firm acquired a major web development firm." The deal is also interesting because iCrossing seems to be a smaller company than Proxicom by revenues. iCrossing's 2005 revenues were $31.3M on a headcount of 215.
An old friend sold his company to Proxicom in 2001 or thereabouts and made a small fortune. At the time Proxicom was on a roll, buying company after company and enjoying a very high stock market valuation. When our friend saw that Proxicom was too busy deal making and had lost focus on its clients he sold all of his stock much to the displeasure of management. Best financial decision he could have made. Proxicom went on to tank.
Given how many buyouts iCrossing has done recently (NewGate Internet, Spannerworks, Sharp Analytics) they are making us nervous - it is as if they are becoming the Proxicom of old. This is a classic case of a company buying revenues, but with-out the certainty of knowing how to manage all of these integrations.
Read - Marketing Pilgrim
Posted at 10:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 28, 2007
Coghead Raises $8M For Web Application Builder For Dummies
Coghead is one of new bread of Web application frameworks that is meant to be used by visual designers wh in the past probably felt that they were in over their head with application development Coghead is primary used to create business applications and sets new standards of making business forms creation accessible through drag and drop functions.
Coghead faces competiton from the likes of Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and WyaWorks.
Today, Mountain View's Coghead has raised $8M in second-round funding led by American Capital Strategies led the deal with new investor SAP and they were joined by return backer El Dorado Ventures. Coghead's CEO, Paul McNamara was an EIR at El Dorado. Before that he was BD VP at Red Hat and took part in their IPO lucre.
Coghead says that since launching its public beta program in October 2006, it has attracted more than 16,000 developers with its "No coding required" message.
For pricing, Coghead says: "We're still working on pricing, and will share more with you as we get closer to launch. That said, our pricing will be extremely competitive. We can tell you that we will offer a free trial account, and a subscription model with tiered pricing plans.To give you a rough ballpark, our average user plans will be less than basic cable TV per user per month."
View - site
Posted at 11:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 01, 2007
Web Analytics' Quantcast Funded
San Francisco-based Web analytics firm Quantcast has raised a round of venture capital from The Founders Fund and Revolution Ventures. We don't know the amount of the funding. The free service allows long-tail publishers to place a pixel on their site and then it delivers them demographic data on their readers.
Quantcast's algorithms estimate the gender, age and other demographic information, and provides charts of how a site compares with the average internet user. The company's "Mass Inference" algorithm then takes visitor information and combines it with panel data the company has collected from a million + internet user households to infer what the likely demographics are.
We have been using Quantcast here at the a:c and appreciate the look and feel, however, the results were way off due to comment spam and links on the a:c (curse you spammers). Consequently, Quantcast thinks our readers are here for porn and drugs.
The company competes at the high end with Comscore, however, in our experience, Comscore's panel-based business will not work with sites on the long tail. It more directly competes with iPro.
Due to Comment Spam on the a:c, Quantcast thinks our readership has a similar audience as Dutchboys.com
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Posted at 11:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 06, 2007
General Atlantic Has Acquired Domain Name Pioneer Network Solutions
General Atlantic has acquired Network Solutions from Najafi Cos. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal. Network Solutions was founded eons ago in 1973 and has been overtaken by more aggressive firms like GoDaddy.
Network Solutions has had so many owners of late it comes with a suit case. The company had a monopoly on domain name registration which led Verisign to pay billions to but it. Najafi Companies purchased from VeriSign in November 2003 for just $100M. The deal represents the third change in ownership in less than nine years.
Read - Network Solutions changes hands (IT Pro)
Posted at 11:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 13, 2006
Event Analytics Heart-throb - BD Metrics Gets $7.5M
Catonsville, MD-based even analytics software company BD Metrics has landed $7.5M in a second round of venture funding. The company has developed an ROI model to help companies to justify boondogles to Las Vegas - or not. BD Metrics has also smartly trade-marked the killer marketing slogon "You-Based™" - as in You-Based™ technology.
BD Metrics' You-Based™ Events Metrics
Read - Catonsville's BD Metrics raises $7.5 million (Baltimore Business Journal)
Posted at 12:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
