This June, Brightcove's CEO Jeremy Allaire told Sillicon Alley Insider that the company was now profitable and that he expected the company to see a 50% revenue growth in 2009.

Is Google Buying Brightcove's Tech or Its Customers?

While Google could obviously offer the same kind of services Brightcove currently offers on its own YouTube platform, Brightcove has already locked in most of the customers that Google would also be competing for. Also, while YouTube was designed as a consumer platform (even as Google is slowly moving to featuring more commercial content on the site), Brightcove has set up a platform that gives enterprise customers the flexibility and metrics they need. In the end, though, if this rumor is true, Google is most likely more interested in Brightcove's customer base than in its technology.

We asked both Google and Brightcove for a comment about this rumor and will update the post when/if we hear from them.

Update: as Dan Rayburn points out in the comments below and on his blog, Brightcove's setup requires its customers to use third-party content-delivery networks like Limelight to stream their videos. If Google really acquires Brightcove, this could turn out to be a problem, as it would keep Google from being able to use YouTube's (cheap) infrastructure.

Image by Peachtree Media Advisors

Mike Macadaan started Twiistup two years ago when he was a UX/design creative executive at AOL. When he moved from NorCal to SoCal, he started the event to make friends and networking connections, not planning on growing the event beyond the initial two instances. Instead of just concocting another mixer, he added a few twists, and Twiistup gained popularity and a hundred or so attendees with each occurrence.

Photo by Mike Macadaan.

"Conferences are boring as sh*t, but Twiistup was just this party. He sold 600 tickets and had 600 people on the waiting list. At at that point, Twiistup became L.A.'s flagship event. Twiistup 5 this February was held in a hangar in the Santa Monica airport, all decked out in this cyberpunk, Blade Runner kind of thing. Mike had 1,000 people with a 400-person waiting list. He really never planned for it to be this big. It's too big and valuable to just stop, but it also became too big for Mike to take it to the next level."

Enter Dao, a "funemployed" SoCal entrepreneur, author, and blogger.

"It's a natural fit when you learn that, in a former life, he was both a standup comic and life coach," wrote Sean Percival of Dao in today's installment of LaLaWag.

"Tired of having to make a scene at other people's events, Francisco started to arrange his own unique series of fun-inspired get-togethers. Rumor has it he may even make a career out of it, bringing you a new type of tech event, with a twist."

Hint, hint.

So when silent investors bought the brand, Dao was brought on board. He is raising the stakes by making Twiistup 6 a two-day event. He's thinking of it as "a mini-TED" with an evening party and a all-day stage event the following day. Already, Dao has secured several tech and mainstream persons of note as speakers.

Photo by Mike Macadaan.

Twiistup is already known for its New Tech-esque "Showoff" competition and signature evening event; the addition of a full conference agenda and the seeding of similar event models in other cities are two immediate enhancements announced with the influx of new capital.

"The groundswell of community support for Twiistup in other states, let alone Los Angeles, has been incredible to watch and it's the driving reason Twiistup's reputation has spread so far and wide," said Macadaan. "People from New York, Colorado, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and even Switzerland have reached out wanting to create a similar experience to help bring their communities together. I'm thrilled that Twiistup will get the dedicated time and focus it needs to become bigger and even better."

There have also been suggestions that Twiistup should be a regional event with national reach, such as South by Southwest. "It should be on the level of Blogwold, TechCrunch 50, a young and hip tech show," said Dao. "The one thing I'm sure about is that Twiistup is going to be a lot bigger."

The next Twiistup will take place July 30-31 at the Universal Hilton in Universal City, Los Angeles.

Integration with WordPress

PollDaddy and WordPress were already working on integrating PollDaddy into the WordPress.com platform, and, as PollDaddy's founders put it, "in the end, it just seemed like the perfect fit for us to join them." As has been the standard for Automattic's acquisitions, PollDaddy will continue to operate as a standalone platform and the company will continue to support and develop it on other blog and social networking platforms.

WordPress.com has already integrated PollDaddy's functionality for its users, who can now easily add surveys to any blog post, which will surely give PollDaddy's user numbers a significant boost. Automattic is also making a PollDaddy plugin available for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Here is a short overview of how the WordPress.com integration works:

Dba.dk is Denmark's largest online classifieds and auctions site and has been able to challenge eBay in its own market.

Fewer Auction - More Direct Transactions

EBay's move to acquire classifieds sites and payment services is part of the company's strategy of putting less emphasis on auctions and more on direct transactions. EBay is currently in a bit of a slump and its workforce reduction is clearly meant to keep cost under control while the company restructures its business.

The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.

Context

Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.

Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.

The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.

StumbleUpon was a bargain at $75 million and probably a worthwhile experiment for eBay, but now that eBay's future does not look as rosy as it once did, we think it only makes sense for eBay to sell it off again. According to TechCrunch, eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to find a buyer, though the asking price is not clear.

We contacted eBay about these rumors and will update this post once we get a response.

Skype?

It would be easy to draw parallels to eBay's acquisition of Skype, which eBay bought for the staggering amount of $2.6 billion. Skype, too, was never fully integrated into eBay's business model. However, as Peter Kafka notes, this extremely high purchase price also makes a sale very difficult now, unless eBay is willing to take a loss. Only a handful of companies are able to pay $3 billion or more, which leaves Google as one of the few potential candidates.

The Afrigator interface, algorithm and user experience were key in driving the kind of growth that made it an interesting acquisition target. We haven't been able to get any details on the record about the price paid but suffice it to say that Afrigator's founders and angel investors have all been well rewarded.

If you're unfamiliar with the blogging scene in Africa, Afrigator is a good place to discover top blogs there like The Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader, the occasionally prurient tech blog iMod, the very politicized Black Looks and the internationally minded Afromusing.

We'd like to offer our congratulations to the Afrigator team and to the African blogosphere, whose work has been recognized by a large traditional company as important enough to warrant a significant acquisition in that space. Such recognition isn't the most important thing in the world, the social media world has plenty of its own inherent worth, but such validation is nice too, even for people beyond the founding team. We assume that Afrigator will expand its operations significantly with this infusion of support.

Earlier this year, AOL acquired Bebo for a hefty $850 million. While the news was huge, we didn't think the acquisition would be particularly beneficial to AOL or Bebo. I don't see this being any different with SocialThing! in the picture now. The acquisition is still coming to a close and no financial details have yet to be released. SocialThing! has published a blog post with more details about the acquisition.

Web 2.0 Going Mainstream?

This acquisition may have other results outside of bringing AOL more consumers. For instance, lifestreaming is definitely picking up in the mainstream arena. We've written plenty of articles about lifestreaming in recent weeks because we're noticing that the trend is spreading. Is it going mainstream? There has definitely been a ton of recent activity to hint at it. First, Facebook integrates the aggregation of popular services such as Twitter and Flickr. Now AOL is snapping up SocialThing!. It should only be a matter of time before bids for FriendFeed start to float around. Outside of lifestreaming, but still in the web 2.0 arena, CBS acquired Last.FM last year for $280 million. So, let me rephrase my question: are different components of web 2.0 going mainstream or is the entire concept finally catching on?

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.

AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.

As Larry Dignan points out, this deal has a precedent in Icahn's proxy fight with Motorola in 2007. In the end, there, too, Icahn got seats for his picks on an expanded Motorola board, though this did nothing to improve the performance of Motorola's stock.

While this current deal gives the Yahoo board a chance to focus once again and getting Yahoo back on track, it remains to be seen what Icahn is going to do once he takes his seat on the board. Given his intense focus on selling at least part of Yahoo to Microsoft, it wouldn't be surprising to see him take up this topic once more.

It also remains to be seen what Microsoft will to do next. Now that a deal with Yahoo is out of the cards in the near future, we might see Microsoft pursue more search oriented acquisitions. As Microsoft can't just buy additional market share, it will either have to dramatically improve its search or seriously expand its marketing efforts to gain back the market share it has lost to Google.

In its letter, on the other hand, Microsoft stresses that it submitted a new proposal specifically at the request of Yahoo's chairman Roy Bostock that included the advertising deal outlined in Yahoo's rejection letter. However, Microsoft says it did not request any changes to the Yahoo board.

In his own open letter (PDF) today, Carl Icahn, too, is trying to set the record straight. According to his statement, Yahoo purposely mischaracterized Microsoft's offer by putting too much stress on a 24 hour deadline Microsoft had supposedly set, as well as by pushing the idea that Microsoft might still be interested in buying all of Yahoo, while it is only interested in Yahoo's search business at this point.

Of course, Icahn also stresses that Microsoft is now willing to commit a lot more money than before Icahn got involved in the deal.

As we are getting closer to August 1, when Yahoo's shareholders will get to decide on the fate of Yahoo, this constant mudslinging will surely continue and will, if anything, only get worse. We are already at a point where constant misinformation is being disseminated by all parties involved (to the detriment of the shareholders who will have the ultimate say in this deal). It is not even clear if the latest Microsoft proposal was a 'joint proposal' as Icahn calls it, or if the replacement of the Yahoo board was really part of the proposed deal.

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed the Microsoft-Yahoo saga had come to a quiet end. Now, however, we can look forward to at least another three weeks of battling open letters and announcements.

Icahn is clearly pushing to get Microsoft back to the negotiation table and given Microsoft's response to his letter, this is apparently still a possibility.

Microsoft thinks that a deal with Yahoo is impossible with the current board still in place, because Yahoo's management would be prone to mismanaging the company during the potentially long regulatory delay of the acquisition. Icahn notes that the old board has to go, simply because "one thing is clear -- Jerry Yang and the current board of Yahoo! will not be able to 'botch up' a negotiation with Microsoft again, simply because they will not have the opportunity."

Judging from the letter, Icahn is still completely transfixed on Microsoft as the only possible partner for Yahoo. His first objectives, if elected to the board himself, would be to immediately start negotiating with Microsoft and to replace Jerry Yang "with a new CEO with operating experience".

At the same time, though, rumors about Yahoo being in merger talks with Time Warner also resurfaced again today.

It's important to note that Hitwise bases its data solely on US traffic. Yahoo is also very popular in Asia. There, these numbers might look slightly different.

As rumors about the future of Yahoo continue swirling around the net, these numbers from Hitwise give us at least some idea that selling only its search business to Microsoft (or anybody else) would still allow the core of Yahoo to continue doing just fine. At the same time, though, the rest of Yahoo would become even more dependent on Google for its traffic.

Update: Yahoo! and Google have indeed announced a partnership in the form of a non-exclusive deal allowing Yahoo! to run Google advertising alongside search results. The press release is here.

The clumsy $44 billion mating dance that began in February between Microsoft and Yahoo! officially came to an end today. Yahoo! and Microsoft each issued statements saying that talks had been concluded, though Microsoft left the door open for non-outright-acquisition partnerships. Meanwhile, multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo! and Google are set to announce some sort of search deal, perhaps as early as today. So what's next for both companies?

Yahoo!'s stock sank 10% on the news that the Microsoft deal was definitely off the table. And the company reportedly lost three key employees today as well. Usama Fayyad, the Executive Vice President of Research, Technology Evangelist and key open source advocate Jeremy Zawodny, and EVP of the Network Division Jeff Weiner are all supposedly planning leave the company. Definitely not a good day for Yahoo!

Plan B prospects don't look great for the Sunnyvale, CA-based company. The brightest alternative is the prospect of a search outsourcing deal with Google. That deal, if it happens, could take any number of forms -- Google takes control of all Yahoo! search marketing, Google takes control of a portion of search marketing, Yahoo! open sources their search marketing allowing both Google and Microsoft to sell on their inventory, etc.

Given that Microsoft left the door open to an "alternative transaction," which we have speculated may be the acquisition of Yahoo!'s search business, it might be unlikely that a Google-Yahoo! deal would shut Microsoft out completely.

The dissolution of the Yahoo!-Microsoft acquisition talks also means more pressure is put on Yahoo!'s in house efforts to bolster their search business -- which slipped again last month -- such as SearchMonkey (our coverage) and Panama (our coverage). Last summer we wrote that the path to fixing Yahoo! started with a developer platform -- that's the direction they are headed with SearchMonkey. Without Microsoft, they have a lot riding on its success.

Microsoft

Microsoft has more options than Yahoo! Without Yahoo!, making a dent in Google's dominant search market share seems even more implausible, but the company can do other things to shake up their web business. We suggested a detail plan B in February that would have Microsoft "split up the search advertising atom" and basically open source their web marketing business. By breaking advertising up into inventory, placement, and parameters and allowing anyone to sell over this open model, we predicted that Microsoft could potentially make a huge impact on Google's web advertising dominance.

"Let Google be the search giant. Instead, focus on shaking up the advertising industry by pushing it toward a democratized structure, make it work for everyone, and weaken Google's business model," we wrote.

We've also suggested that Microsoft could put search on Facebook. "There are two ways people find information on the Internet: via search (which Google is great at), and via their friends (which Facebook is great at). The former we also know how to monetize. If Facebook can get good at search, it could stand to make a lot of money for whoever it partners with for that -- the logical choice being Microsoft," we wrote last month. Microsoft might even consider buying Facebook as an alternative to Yahoo!

Of course, not buying Yahoo! (or Facebook) would free up a ton of cash for Microsoft to do what it said it would last October: start investing heavily in small, web 2.0 start ups. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company would buy 20 companies per year ranging from $50 million to $1 billion for the next five years (likely they can acquire a lot of great technology for even less than that).

Our advice: invest heavily in mobile. If you can't beat Apple in the handset or software market, at least make a move to become the dominant content and advertising provider on the mobile web and beat Google to it.

What do you think are Microsoft and Yahoo!'s next moves? Let us know in the comments below.