

Yahoo to buy FourSquare for $100M?  - jakarta
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100416/can-yahoo-nab-foursquare-for-125-million-or-will-vcs-prevail-the-race-for-the-hot-mobile-start-up-nears-its-end/?mod=e2tw

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rdl
If so, the only relevant question is what they will name the third independent
incarnation of this service after Yahoo runs FourSquare into the ground, as
Google did with Dodgeball.

Destroying value with ill-conceived M&A is one area where Yahoo can beat
Google!

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influx
Talk about great investment opportunity, drop me a note when you need some
seed money for the third go around. Flickr is the only Yahoo acquisition that
comes to mind that they haven't run into the ground and then abandoned.

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jmatt
Y! seemed to make some good buys a looong time ago in the mid 90s.

Then they bought broadcast.com and geocities. Those are a few log10 larger
purchases and were total failures. So even if there were successful small
acquisitions they are hidden by the scale of their bad M&A decisions. M&A is
probably still trying to make up for the losses they incurred in 1999.

More recently they bought delicious which I love and continued to use without
even noticing that they were acquired. After that the next "success" I can
think of is rivals.com which seems like a good buy and good match.

Yahoo still has some great niche (maybe that's a misnomer) markets like
fantasy sports and investing. So when they strengthen an existing strong
property it seems to work better than bringing in something new.

See: [http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-sorry-acquisition-
hist...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-sorry-acquisition-
history-2009-5)

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benofsky
Am I the only one which really does not see location in the sense FourSquare
implements it becoming a mainstream thing in the next few years. Perhaps I'm
being naive but I juts don't see it as something people want that much.

EDIT: Removed "as facebook comes", dunno what it was doing there, made no
sense!

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billturner
It's interesting how the article doesn't mention Google's purchase of his last
location service, Dodgeball, which it eventually ran into the ground after
letting it flounder for a couple of years.

I know it's just speculation but I'd hate to see this project get run into the
ground just as his last one (and other Yahoo! acquisitions).

~~~
benofsky
Yahoo to be honest has actually done pretty well on not running acquisitions
into the ground: Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming, Inquisitor, etc.

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joshu
I would not say delicious really thrived though.

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benofsky
Sure, nor the others (except maybe Flickr), Yahoo's problem is that they seem
to acquire and then do nothing but rarely have they run acquisitions into the
ground as such.

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aaronbrethorst
Flickr's on life support. From what I can tell peering in from the outside,
the service is down to a skeleton crew. Too bad, really: I love Flickr, and
don't look forward to seeing it croak.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The sad thing about Flickr is that it's being killed by Facebook and their
massive picture uploading. And the only way that's a superior service is in
sharing with friends, it falls way short in every other way. I suppose the
sharing aspect is just what consumers have decided to value most.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Facebook must be killing them on the consumer side.

On the higher end, photographers are using services like
<http://smugmug.com/>, <http://carbonmade.com/> and <http://livebooks.com/>

I fancy myself as belonging to the prosumer/dedicated amateur photographer
segment, and Flickr's still the best bet for me due to its social features and
willingness to let me upload high-res photos.

But I'd jump ship in a heartbeat if I could find another service that gave me
a large community of like-minded photographers looking to improve their craft,
AND the ability to securely store all of my RAW files.

Seriously, I cannot overstate how important it is to me to be able to stuff
all of my RAW files and finished products somewhere secure (in the data backup
sense).

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hkuo
This seems like it would be a dangerous move on Yahoo's part, aside from the
acquisition of talent. This is only my gut feeling, but I don't see users
being so vested in the FourSquare service, that if they're unhappy with the
direction it is taking, just jumping ship to Gowalla. A lot of people already
check in through multiple services, and it wouldn't be too hard a decision to
stop checking in with one if it's flavor turns sour.

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jamesshamenski
Yahoo is focused on local and so this makes some sense. Twice Jerry Yang
vetoed an offer to buy Yelp. Yeah twice. Internally there was some bitterness
about missing that deal.

Yahoo needs some M+A action to boost stock momentum and that's a multi-billion
dollar move that needs to be carefully planned.

Yahoo also needs to counter the google 'what's nearby' feature.

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sunchild
Yahoo is focused on squandering money on overhyped, flash-in-the-pan products,
in order to hasten its demise. Words like "stock momentum" and "focused on
local" are apparently euphemisms for "lost in the woods".

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kylebragger
Hopefully history does not repeat itself this time around. I can see no
compelling reason to sell (unless you count wealth and having an exit under
your belt as one [or two]). What would they gain from selling this service to
Yahoo, or anyone for that matter? Doing that would likely start the countdown
to another great service destroyed by M&A.

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bond
Well it's an insane offer, if they don't take it they are insane...IMO The
space is getting crowded...

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MicahWedemeyer
Whatever happened to FireEagle (<http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/>)? I haven't
heard anything about them for a long time now.

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fizx
AFAIK, it went down with the rest of brickhouse about a year ago.

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andrewljohnson
I can't tell who the idiot here is... Google or Yahoo?

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naner
This is beyond absurd.

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jmtame
they won't sell right now. just look at dodgeball.

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amadiver
I hate you, Kevin. _

