[Infowarrior] - Comcast Acquires Plaxo

[Richard Forno]

Comcast Acquires Social Contact List Plaxo
by: Michael Arrington posted on: May 15, 2008 | about stocks: CMCSA

http://seekingalpha.com/article/77387-comcast-acquires-social-contact-list-plaxo

The rumors were accurate: Comcast (CMCSA) will announce their  
acquisition of social contact list Plaxo today. Financial terms are  
not being disclosed, but the purchase price is between $150 and $170  
million. Plaxo, which was founded in 2002, has raised just under $30  
million in venture capital.

Plaxo has been the subject of considerable acquisition rumors lately,  
with both Google and Facebook named as potential suitors.

Plaxo says they will remain an independent organization in Silicon  
Valley. It will report into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a  
division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses  
focused on entertainment, information and communication.

More from Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub:

     Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on  
a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book  
for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later  
this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book  
accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more  
than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number  
of accounts to nearly 50 million.

     Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social  
media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early- 
adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family  
photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family  
members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or  
in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover  
new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have  
recommended.

     So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and  
enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve  
and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network  
effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more  
useful they become.

On Monday I had an impromptu interview with Plaxo VP Marketing John  
McCrea and Chief Architect Joseph Smarr. They still had their poker  
faces on with regard to the acquisition:

This ends a long and sometimes troubled history for Plaxo, which was  
founded by Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering  
students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, in 2002. In 2006 the company  
finally abandoned its hated “viral” feature that tricked users into  
spamming their entire address book with Plaxo invitations.

More recently, however, Plaxo has been playing nice with the Internet.  
Last year they launched a popular service called Pulse, which pulls  
activity streams from other services into users’ Plaxo profiles. They  
were launch partners with Google Open Social, and announced support  
for DataPortability early this year. Even so, they still had the  
occasional misstep.