Category: Of Note in Search Biz

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 9, 2007 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)

announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire

Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and

compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10

million users worldwide. Postini’s services — which include message

security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — can be used

to protect a company’s email, instant messaging, and other web-based

communications. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will acquire

Postini for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other

adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of

Google. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and

is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.

“With this transaction, we’re reinforcing our commitment to delivering

compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the

addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to

users — they can also streamline the complex information security

mandates within these organizations,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of

the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Google.

According to Yavonditte, Quigo has perfected a relevancy algorithm that does AdSense one better – far better, to paraphrase his words. Quigo is focusing on picking off the high-brand-value publishers who use AdSense but are looking for a network solution that pays them more for what they believe is significantly better inventory than the lowest common denominator AdSense approach.

Well, it’s been a long three years, but Michael recently landed Time Inc. as a customer, in a high profile partnership that has shined the spotlight on the (sort of) startup. So I asked him for a Searchblog Brief Interview. The results are below.



So, first question. What do you think motivated Time Inc. to work with Quigo over Google?


A few reasons: Quigo will make Time Warner more money over the next 3-years. They can leverage their dominant media brands to command top
prices from advertisers and begin to “bundle” performance-based advertising with more traditional forms such as banner ads. 

Time’s senior management team spent a lot of time with Quigo’s team over the past 6-months. It’s a real partnership based on economic and product
development considerations. They want to sell their advertisers into the program — an important yet misunderstood part of our business model,
and not an area I wish to spend too much time on here. They want to control their pricing and relationships. Our system let’s them do both.
They want to collaborate to build new ad formats. And, they want world-class yield management. Yield is one of our core competencies.


We package all this up like no one else in the world today and deliver within a white label environment. The macro trends favor our approach here.


Norway’s Fast Search & Transfer has acquired US-based AgentArts for an undisclosed amount. San Francisco-based AgentArts, which was actually founded in Australia, has has developed a personalization and recommendation engine.

AgentArts had received funding from Aegis Partners, Amphion Capital Management, TiNSHED Corporation, Amtabity, Nokia Innovent. It competes with Pandora and The Music Finder in music as well as more broadly with Aggregate Knowledge, Choicestream and Kefta, which was bought by Axciom