
  Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google  - dwynings
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/06/aardvark-mulls-over-a-30-million-offer-from-google/
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mattiss
Who is in charge of acquisitions at Google? Not to say that there isn't
awesome tech behind Aardvark, but really 2 ex-Google buyouts in as many days?
If I were a shareholder in Google I would be wondering...

Work at Google -> Make friends with your boss -> Build start-up -> Cash in on
nepotism?

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vsingh
Here's another way to look at it: not only do they get their employees to
spend 20% of their time working on their own cool stuff for Google, they have
ex-employees spending 100% of their time working on their own cool stuff for
Google. :)

~~~
ciupicri
Yeah, but for what price?

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jamesjyu
I fully expect this to arrive in my inbox:

(Aardvark) Help someone with a question about _accepting an offer price from
Google_

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jasonlbaptiste
This would be a steal for Google. The tech behind the scenes is impressive.
The service is very intuitive and is so far tied as one of my favorite apps of
the past few years (boxee and dropbox are the other 2). Part of me wants to
see them stick it out, but the other part of me would love to see the team get
a payday+give the service a boost to be a mainstream hit with google behind
it.

~~~
jmtame
agreed. the first time i saw their product, i was skeptical, and then after
signing up i remember thinking 'this is awesome, it's like irc, but anyone can
use it.'

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jimboyoungblood
I'm confused. How is Aardvark worth anything close to $30MM?

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mwerty
My guess is that there is an M&A department that is goaled on acquiring
startups (i.e. someone gets a bonus for closing deals within certain
parameters).

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idebug
Can someone fill me in on what Aardvark is, what makes it so amazing and why
it's worth $30 mill?

~~~
ramanujan
Type in a question and it will find people on Twitter and Facebook in your
social network who are best able to answer that question.

It is for the specific situation where (1) someone you know _should_ know the
answer to a question but you don't know who and (2) you don't mind everyone in
the world potentially knowing which question you asked and (3) you haven't
asked too many questions like this which have been answered by the same
people.

For example, any blog or twitter posts asking for advice might be turned into
aardvark queries. Some emails as well.

The most killer app could be within companies. If this actually worked it
would be like a telepathic routing protocol. Better than the distraction of a
mass email, and potentially less maintenance than a wiki. Getting it to work
in a biz environment would probably require a whole different set of features
for prediction (especially mining of email networks like Palantir and
Cataphora).

My main problem with it is that as currently formulated it would have to get
amazingly intelligent to beat the speed and privacy of a search box.

Perhaps a revised version would just take my query and tell me _who_ to ask
rather than directly routing the query there. This way I can bother them only
if I think they'll actually have the time, give a good answer, haven't
bothered them before, etc.

~~~
idebug
Thanks for clarifying that. Sounds neat, but, for those features, I question
the $30 million price tag.

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bham
_So the decision comes down to sell now and take the guaranteed money, or roll
the dice and go for the big win._

As anyone who watches _Cash Cab_ knows, _take the money and run._

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ThinkWriteMute
I just tried Aardvark and I love it. My friend tried Aardvark and /everything
went wrong/. Even unregistering crashed his browser.

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sachinag
I hope they sell, if only so that I don't have to give yet another service my
e-mail address and password. I mean, they use Facebook Connect, but then they
want me to also give them an e-mail address and password. So goddamn
irritating. I'm OK with creating new accounts on a site that has my credit
card information, but otherwise, this has to stop. Every important identity
provider supports OAuth at this point.

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leej
if this is true, it's like Google is planning a big re-union.

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gcb
I bet the offer went: how about 30mil to prevent you from bitching on hacker
news when we launch this same functionality on wave?

