

Yahoo to Acquire Xoopit for About $20 Million - blazamos
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090721/yahoo-acquires-xoopit/

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terpua
I'm happy for the founders (not sure about the VCs...couldn't have made much
if $6.5M raised) but for the life of me don't understand why it's worth $20M.
I was an early user of Xoopit (for Gmail) and uninstalled it after a week.
Using search was faster and easier.

Edit: at least for Gmail, Labs can easily add Xoopit's functionality.

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mahmud
Never underestimate the huge mass of non-technical people on the internet. I
found it refreshing to stop by wifi-enabled cafes and just LOOK at what people
where doing online. You will be surprised.

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apgwoz
This would be the killer app for my mother who uses her GMail account to store
photos people send her to her ISP email where the quota is low. But, she uses
Internet Explorer, despite my attempts to convert her to Firefox. This is
great bait.

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mahmud
With productivity apps you're selling to two audiences: 1) the actual end
user, and 2) the tech geek who is set to choose an appropriate application for
the end user.

From my experience, stuff like AVG anti-virus, Adaware, Spybot S&D and LogMeIn
started spreading from the ground up, spearheaded by tech support guys and the
token kid in the family who is "good with computers". As more and more elderly
and non-technical people move to web applications (and not just websites) you
will see a new category of bi-targeted applications that help tech savvy
people "help" and "reach" their non-geek family and friends. Case in point,
YOU looking for stuff for your mother (note this new stuff is a "web app" :-)

Web app marketing will need to shoot from a double-barrel, and a new style of
"Easy enough for your boss/family to use" marketing will have to be born.

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jakewolf
Bought to motivate people to start developing/integrating with yahoo mail.

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agotterer
It would be interesting if Yahoo mail took a labs approach and then opened it
up to the development community. Gmail labs has some great features. But I
would love to be able to directly interface with an API as opposed to hacking
together an extension.

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joshu
Yahoo will take forever to integrate. Mail is an enormous system. I cannot
imagine this will go well or quickly.

Goodbye, Xoopit, we hardly knew you.

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jonursenbach
Good to know that Yahoo has 20 million to blow while laying off another 5% of
their workforce.

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nose
You got that from techcrunch? They made it up.

