What an amazing coincidence.

On the very day Yahoo’s board is considering actual bids from two private equity firms interested in deals to buy close to 20 percent of the company for between $16.50 and $17.50 a share, comes a spate of eerily similar breathless media postings that there’s another bid in the making for $20!

That’s totes better, right? I mean, how can Yahoo’s directors accept a real live lesser-priced bid now when there’s a prettier one in the fog just ahead?

No, really, it’s there — if you squint really, really hard.

Except it’s not even close, when you actually check with two of the key members of the group of alleged buyers, which would apparently be Blackstone, Bain Capital and Yahoo’s Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank.

Sources close to Blackstone and Alibaba said while there have been talks, which have been previously reported weeks ago here and elsewhere, there is no bid in the offing that is close to fruition and at that price.

In an unusual public statement, in fact, Alibaba’s John Spelich said flatly: “Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole-company bid for Yahoo.”

This from a company whose voluble CEO Jack Ma is prone to making giant and noisy speeches to signal his interest in finding a way — any way — to get back shares of the Chinese Internet giant from Yahoo.

Not this time, and several sources close to Alibaba reiterated that it was nowhere near close to any bid as yet and that a price is still up in the air. In addition, sources added, Alibaba might decide to work with another PE group, such as Providence Equity.

In addition, sources noted that if Alibaba could strike an adequate deal with private equity bidders to get a large chunk of the stake back, it would be highly preferable to a hostile takeover of Yahoo that could end in tears and little else.

“The threat of a takeover is more useful than the damage an actual takeover would cause for everyone,” said one person close to the situation. “No one wants this to be unfriendly.”

So why the rumors — doubtlessly being spread around by hopelessly cynical Wall Street types interested only in stock manipulation — surfacing today?

Simple: To get some easy-to-play media outlet to bite, report it as speculative fact and cause the stock of Yahoo to take flight tomorrow.

Hey, it could happen!

Sadly, this junior-league trick has already worked — Yahoo shares were up a dollar to $16.72 in after-hours trading tonight.

It is likely to go even higher tomorrow, which could cause the board of Yahoo to delay accepting either of the partial bids from Silver Lake or TPG Capital, even if they were the best thing for the company and its employees.

Except that the job of the Yahoo board is to evaluate what’s before them and not what is perhaps, someday, soon, wait-by-the-phone, really soon, I promise is going to be delivered.

In fact, several sources noted that it’s not clear if the Yahoo board has even asked for parties to submit whole-company bids yet.

When and if Yahoo’s board does that and if something better actually does come down the pike, with a much fatter price tag of $20 or more, then the directors can mull that over.

That would be the prudent thing to do for the company, its employees and its shareholders, even if Yahoo’s stock gets a temporary lift now.

Maybe I am just a hopeless Silicon Valley romantic and not a hardened Wall Street M&A type, but the survival of Yahoo is the real point here, rather than the lining of bankers’ already fee-stuffed pockets.

And anything other than that is just fog.

The Singapore-based media group, which publishes 18 newspapers here, seeks unspecified damages from Yahoo Southeast Asia Pte. Ltd. for the alleged copyright infringements, as well as a legal injunction to prevent further infringements, according to a writ filed last week to the city-state’s High Court.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Asana, the high-profile group collaboration start-up founded by former Facebook execs, is moving out of private beta after a year, and will launch to the general public.

Currently in use by thousands of users at hundreds of beta companies, Asana said it will now put its efforts at tweaking the product to a wider test.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down,” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, presumably so frustrated workers can achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The product can be used for free by teams of fewer than 30 users.

“Our beta users have helped us in shaping our prioritization in the workspace,” said Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Moskovitz said that the company — which raised $9 million in venture funding two years ago, and $1 million before that from Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors — is not in need of more funds and will not yet release a paid product.

Co-founder Justin Rosenstein added that one future direction will be the growth of the mobile application arena for Asana, which already has offerings.

Here are some screenshots of the Asana offering:

Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said today that it was joining well-known investors Ron Conway and DST Global’s Yuri Milner in the Y Combinator Start Fund, which gives $150,000 to each start-up in its semi-annual group.

Andreessen Horowitz will be investing $50,000 of the total in each entrepreneurial effort, starting with the next “class” of up to five dozen companies later this month in the well-regarded incubator.

The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which is a loan that can convert if a start-up raises a funding round. Start-ups can refuse the money, although most do not.

“I can’t tell you how impressed we have been with the quality of the start-ups that Y Combinator has had,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with me this afternoon. “[Co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston] have become the consigliere to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs.”

Indeed. Y Combinator assembles these start-ups twice a year, giving them about $15,000 to work on their idea, but — more importantly — providing a lot of support and entree to powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Its efforts have been critical to the beginnings of many successful companies, such as Reddit, Loopt and Scribd.

“So many of the high quality seed deals have been coming from Y Combinator and we wanted to be close to all those companies,” said Andreessen. “It’s a great view of what’s coming next from the very best start-ups.”

As expected, the European Commission approved Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype late last week.

Next, the deal for the popular Internet communications company — which had previously been cleared by U.S. regulators — is likely to officially close later this week (paperwork!), said several sources close to the situation.

Now, of course, comes the hard part — which is whether Microsoft can successfully integrate the more nimble Skype into the belly of the software beast and allow it to thrive.

Some key questions:

How smoothly can Microsoft integrate Skype into its existing products, such as its unified communications platform, Outlook mail and Hotmail, Office, Messenger and Xbox Live? And, perhaps most of all, Windows Phone devices?

That said, will Skype also get to do what it needs for its own success beyond Microsoft? That includes working with mobile rivals Apple and Google, who now dominate the smartphone market, as well as many others. It has already managed to buy GroupMe group messaging start-up for $85 million, just months after its own acquisition in May.

And can the division — which will be led by Tony Bates, Skype’s CEO and now a Microsoft president — operate successfully located mostly away from the power center of Redmond, Wash.? Skype has a substantial office in Silicon Valley, as well as key engineering units in Estonia and Stockholm.

In that vein, will Microsoft be able to hold on to new talent like Bates and Skype’s geek squad, all of whom have substantial choices elsewhere? Like a lot of large tech companies, Microsoft is not known for being able to hold on to those who come in from the outside, in large part due to its insular culture of longtime execs.

In other words, how big a welcome will Microsoft’s other powerful presidents — such as Windows division head Steven Sinofsky — give Bates and company?

According to sources close to the situation, Guilherme Ribenboim, VP and managing director of Latin America and U.S. Hispanic markets, has left Yahoo for another job at a start-up.

The 12-year Yahoo veteran, who is located in Brazil, is widely respected at the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant and leads an area that is growing for it.

[UPDATE: A Yahoo spokeswoman confirmed the departure of Ribenboim.]

[UPDATE NO. 2: Also leaving: Connie Lee Schiefer, the well-regarded Yahoo veteran of more than eight years. She was VP of product management at Yahoo's cloud platform group.]

Sources said that attrition — already a big problem at Yahoo — is about to hit the company hard. While the board and its top leaders try to figure out a strategy — either a sale or whatev — in the wake of the firing of CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo has yet to put in place a new plan to hold onto talent.

“The people walking out the door is about to become a flood, unless management acts,” said one employee in a common sentiment among people I have interviewed at Yahoo.

It was just supposed to be a three-hour tour, um, quick sale process!

But, like a storm-tossed ship looking for any safe harbor, the Myspace sale is still chugging along, with a deal that continues to be tossed around amongst low-paying and new lesser known buyers who are now in the $20 million to $30 million range, said sources close to the situation.

The price, said others, could go as high as $35 million, but it’s far cry from the $100 million that News Corp. had been aiming for.

As part of the deal, sources said the News Corp. unit will be making significant cuts in staff and costs — up to 50 percent or more — all contingent on the purchaser. The staff cuts are, obviously, directly related to the transaction and the winning bidder.

The media giant might also retain a small minority stake.

The two names — Specific Media and Golden Gate Capital — that are now in the forefront for an acquisition deal that News Corp. hopes to complete by Thursday, its fiscal year end, have not been among the acquirers mentioned previously in the myriad of reports about the deal.

Specific Media — a large, if lesser known, advertising network — seems to be in the lead, said sources. It has been around for a half-decade and has been funded by Francisco Partners.

Golden Gate Capital is a private equity firm with $9 billion under management, which has mostly specialized in turning around companies. It has never invested in a consumer Internet company.

Both companies, sources said, will focus Myspace on music, although it is not clear which rights the site has with music labels will transfer to a new owner.

Until last week, the preferred deal for Myspace centered on an investor group that included Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and in which News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) would retain a large minority ownership stake.

But sources said there were some transactional and legal complexities that made it less attractive and News Corp. opened up the deal talks with others again last week.

Golden Capital and Specific Media emerged most aggressively, although there still remain other interested parties, sources close to the situation said, among them another investor group that includes Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson, one its other co-founder Chris DeWolfe is part of and also interest from the Criterion Capital Partners, which bought AOL’s Bebo social networking site on the cheap a year ago.

But it’s now come down to time constraints and an agreement that can be reached before the end of this month, which is also the end of the media giant’s fiscal year.

In other words, let’s get Myspace off the books for 2012!

How it came to this will likely be the focus of many a business school case. After a spectacular start, Myspace has fallen on hard times both in terms of traffic and advertising revenues.

That’s why the music-focused social networking site has not sat exactly in the catbird’s seat in terms of negotiating leverage.

While there were some rumors last week that News Corp. would close Myspace down, the sale to a small player and the layoffs are the likely outcome.

While that’s cold comfort to its employees, it’s about the best Myspace can hope for right now.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

According to sources close to the situation, News Corp. is down to one possible investing group in its quest to make lemonade out of the lemon that its Myspace social entertainment hub has become.

In the lastest of many scenarios considered, several sources said its owner, News Corp., will continue to own about 20 percent of Myspace. The main bidder is a dark horse bidding group, which includes Activision Chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick as one of the potential investors.

The deal, cautioned sources, is not final and could easily fall apart.

Interestingly, if such a deal is struck, he would apparently be involved as an individual and not for the giant gaming company, and would play no management role in the company.

Kotick would presumably need permission from Activision for such a high-profile investment, even if he played a smaller role.

Kotick’s possible involvement has not been mentioned in previous reports.

Sources said the other possible bidders — including music video service Vevo, a group including Myspace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, an internal effort by current CEO Mike Jones, several private equity firms and even myYearbook — mentioned in past reports have not worked out for various reasons.

Vevo had seemed the likeliest winner, but its bid appears to have foundered for now, due to the complex nature of its music label ownership.

It is not clear what the price will be for Myspace, which was once the leading social networking site before the world dis-Liked it for Facebook.

One thing is certain: It is nowhere near the $100 million that News Corp. reportedly sought.

The site — even after an overhaul to focus on entertainment — has recently been losing money and traffic, although it is still a large destination on the Web.

News Corp. declined comment, as did Kotick.

As it gets ramped up for a wider launch, Asana, the high-profile workplace collaboration start-up founded by top former Facebook execs, has hired former SolarWinds product strategy exec Kenny Van Zant in a “COO-type of role.”

Van Zant, who will be Asana’s first business-side hire, has also worked at a variety of tech companies, including Cisco.

Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein remain at the top of the leadership at the productivity software company, which–perhaps in keeping with its yoga-style name–does not have official titles.

But Van Zant will essentially fulfill the COO role, focusing on bringing Asana to the enterprise market in a socially-fueled, “bottom-up” approach.

“We now have a great product and are ready for our next phase of bringing it to the market,” said Moskovitz, in an interview this afternoon with BoomTown. “While Justin and I continue to work on product and engineering, Kenny will be the driver of that launch.”

Specifically, in a blog post today, Moskovitz wrote:

“Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.”

Asana, which is aimed at helping people work on projects together in groups, is now in private beta.

It tackles the often unexciting, but very large and problematic, workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, which presumably means the product will help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which has raised $9 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, now has 15 employees.

Asana had previously garnered just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

Still, it has not, thankfully, received the intense hype of other innovative start-ups from former Facebookers–hello, Quora!

That said, many who are using Asana think it will make a huge splash as it is rolled out and attempts to bring consumer-style tools to the workplace.

There are, of course, a range of companies doing this in different ways–from Jive to Yammer to LinkedIn and to a variety of cloud-based enterprise efforts by Google and Microsoft.

In an interview, Van Zant said the time was ripe for big changes in the way enterprise-aimed products were bought and sold.

“I will be focused on selling our enterprise software product from the bottom up, rather than targeting the CIO,” said Van Zant. “It is clear the world of enterprise is being impacted by consumer behavior.”

While he does not start until Monday, Van Zant speculated that Asana’s free product offering will remain, with a premium version to come.

Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who made the Asana investment for the firm and is on its board, said the time is right for such businesses aimed at enterprise transformation.

“Kenny wrote the book on this at SolarWinds,” he said. “The consumerization of the enterprise isn’t going to happen–it already has.”

Here is a demo video Asana put out in February of an open house, as well as the blog post from Asana on the Van Zant hire:

Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.

Justin and I are excited to welcome Kenny Van Zant as the newest member of the Asana team. Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.

Until now we’ve focused primarily on developing the Asana product into the best of class solution for task management and project execution. Encouraged by positive feedback from the early adopters in our beta program, we’re now preparing for the company’s next phase–bringing this technology to the rest of the market–and we can’t imagine a better partner than Kenny to drive this strategy and build a strong organization to support it. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer the bottom-up distribution model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and small businesses–a sales approach we plan to develop further at Asana. This experience, together with an almost uncanny overlap of values, made it clear that Kenny is the right fit.

While finding Kenny concludes a long search for the right leader of Asana’s business operations, we are continuing to grow the team, looking for passionate designers and engineers to join us in our common purpose: using software to help groups of people work together more effectively.

–Dustin

Kenny Van Zant is a technology entrepreneur with leadership experience in start-ups and public companies. Kenny was most recently the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from 2006-2010, where he was responsible for products, marketing, and corporate strategy. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer a disruptive business model for selling software and SaaS into the enterprise and SMB segments from the “bottom-up,” using inside sales, online marketing, free products, and a loyal user community. Based on a unique combination of growth and profitability, SolarWinds enjoyed a successful IPO in May of 2009.

Prior to SolarWinds, Kenny was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive (NASD: MOTV) and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump (acquired by Motive), where he managed the company’s growth from start-up in 1999 to over $60M in revenue and 350 global employees within 3 years.

Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/viral-video-the-janedear-girls-hook-up-with-the-lip-synch-phenom-on-youtube/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/viral-video-the-janedear-girls-hook-up-with-the-lip-synch-phenom-on-youtube/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:59:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40842

BoomTown is officially voting for the JaneDear Girls, after seeing the hot country duo’s effective use of Keenan Cahill, a.k.a. the weird little lip-synch dude on YouTube.

While the pair–Susie Brown and Danelle Leverett– have been rocketing up the country charts with their self-titled debut album, they delivered a rap-style offering, called “Need Ya Vote,” using the odd Cahill’s talents.

The Academy of Country Music Awards, which takes place April 3, is conducting fan voting online through Feb. 24 for the 2011 ACM Top New Solo Vocalist and Top New Vocal Duo or Group.

Enjoy:

And here is the popular music video of their top single, “Wildflower”:

The JaneDear Girls – Wildflower (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: The JaneDear Girls

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/viral-video-the-janedear-girls-hook-up-with-the-lip-synch-phenom-on-youtube/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/apple-gets-a-grammy-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/apple-gets-a-grammy-sort-of/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:15:00 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29774 A tiny bit of Grammy glow for Apple: Last night marked the first time something recorded exclusively for its iTunes store won an award. Train’s version of “Hey, Soul Sister,” which won the “Best Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals” category, first appeared on the group’s “iTunes Session” EP last fall. (Though you can now buy the tune on Amazon, too, via a Grammy compilation).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/apple-gets-a-grammy-sort-of/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:17:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40488

One of the more interesting pieces of news that got pushed deep down in stories in the noisy swirl around AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post was the move of its CEO Eric Hippeau back to the investor side.

He’ll be going to Lerer Ventures, which is run by HuffPo co-founder, chairman and major investor Kenneth Lerer.

(In case you wondered: Yes, everyone is interconnected.)

Before landing at HuffPo in mid-2009, Hippeau was a high-profile venture capitalist at SoftBank Capital for many years, starting with his involvement in the legendary $100 million investment in Yahoo at its start.

Hippeau went to SoftBank Capital after selling Ziff-Davis to its parent SoftBank Corp. for $2.1 billion in 1995.

Now he is headed to Lerer, where Hippeau has been an adviser. It which has been run by Lerer and his son Ben–as well as VC and entrepreneur Jordan Cooper–as an angel investing at early-stage seed level.

About a year ago, the New York-based investment fund raised $8.5 million, all from friends, and has focused on 35 start-ups in the city.

Those have included GroupMe, a group texting service, and ad service AdKeeper.

Now, with the addition of Hippeau as a general partner, while still spending down the initial fund, Lerer Ventures is considering a second fund of up to $50 million to allow it flexibility to invest in later stages.

That’s an increasingly common strategy of late, most prominently at Andreessen Horowitz.

“I am really glad to be getting back into investing, since the New York area is especially vibrant at the moment,” said Hippeau in an interview today, who noted that Lerer Ventures also has some investments in Silicon Valley. “And we are really determined to look at changing the way funds are organized.”

And now that he’ll not have a job with the AOL buy–”It has a very good CEO in Tim Armstrong,” joked Hippeau–and having just also stepped down from the Yahoo board, he will have plenty of time to consider all that.

Hippeau listed social, mobile and commerce as big investment arenas, as well as companies related to tablet devices.

“At the Huffington Post, we could see the changes happening to how we distribute our content were becoming profound,” Hippeau said. “It’s a completely different experience.”

I also talked to Ken Lerer, who said that the fund–started off pretty simply–will be trying to define itself more in the coming months before fundraising begins.

“Ben and Jordan are especially plugged into the New York scene–these start-ups were created by their friends,” he said. “And Eric and I bring a different skill set and perspective on top of that.”

Lerer also expressed interest in commerce, as well as local and real-time technologies.

“While it is always an interesting time on the Internet,” he said, fresh from the AOL sale of the HuffPo, in which he was the largest individual shareholder. “But right now is a really interesting time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hey-old-people-totally-use-the-internet-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hey-old-people-totally-use-the-internet-too/#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:45:42 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29260 They don’t even it call it a series of tubes, or whatever. So says the AARP, the not-that-old-people’s advocacy group.

That’s not really news. But they felt compelled to make a video to make their point, anyway.

I think this is supposed to be pitched to marketers, but, again–people who are in the business of reaching people 55 and up should know they’re online, right?

The excellent song, by the way, is “One Thing Leads To Another,” by the Fixx, from 1983. Which is pretty old!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hey-old-people-totally-use-the-internet-too/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:44:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40098

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/australias-scoopon-wont-sell-url-for-286000-so-groupon-sues/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/australias-scoopon-wont-sell-url-for-286000-so-groupon-sues/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:30:56 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1165 Here’s the kind of attention you get when everyone thinks you have deep pockets.

In an appeal to customers today, Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason explained in a blog post why it is suing an Australian competitor, Scoopon.

And the story is pretty juicy: Gabby and Hezi Leibovitch, two brothers who started Scoopon in Australia, have purchased the Groupon.com.au domain name, registered the company name of Groupon Pty Limited and tried registering the Groupon trademark in Australia.

“The way we see things, this is a classic case of domain squatting–an unfortunate reality of the Internet business,” Mason wrote. “As Groupon became internationally known, opportunistic domain squatters around the world started to buy local Groupon domain names, thinking that we’d eventually be forced to buy them at an insane price.”

But wait, there’s more: Groupon offered the brothers $286,000 for the Groupon.com.au domain and trademark, and Mason claims they accepted the offer.

Then they changed their minds (presumably around the time Groupon turned down $6 billion from Google, and then was rumored to be raising nearly $1 billion in fresh capital). No doubt, the Leibovitch brothers now have a much richer number in mind.

To that end, Mason says his company is choosing the path of last resort: “Left with no other options, we’ve filed a lawsuit against Scoopon, claiming that their Groupon trademark was filed in bad faith (amongst other things).”

In the meantime, the nearly $300,000 offer continues to stand, and Groupon has opened shop under an alias: www.stardeals.com.au/.

If a court doesn’t come down on his side, Mason is hoping customers will: “Apologies–we don’t like to bother our customers with these things, but felt you deserved to understand why it’s taking us so long in Australia,” he wrote.

A “Groupon in Australia” Facebook group has been created to raise awareness of the situation, and by this afternoon had already counted 568 members.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/australias-scoopon-wont-sell-url-for-286000-so-groupon-sues/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101224/skypes-group-video-calling-restored/ http://allthingsd.com/20101224/skypes-group-video-calling-restored/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:26:14 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1098 Just in time for Christmas, Skype say it has restored its group video calling feature. Still unrestored is the offline instant messaging feature.

Also still outstanding from CEO Tony Bates and his team is a full explanation about what caused Skype to fail for the better part of two days. He promises that will be coming early next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101224/skypes-group-video-calling-restored/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101223/skype-talks-about-just-how-full-that-half-a-glass-is/ http://allthingsd.com/20101223/skype-talks-about-just-how-full-that-half-a-glass-is/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:27:16 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1343 While some people are still having trouble using Skype and a few features remain unavailable, the Internet telephony company issued a statement on Thursday touting those services that have returned to operation after a massive outage on Wednesday.

“In the last hour, we’ve seen evidence of a significant increase in the number of people online,” Skype said in a blog posting. “Because of the way the Skype software works, it’s not possible for anyone to obtain an exact figure, but we now estimate it to be over 10 million.”

However, according to a graphic elsewhere on the company’s Web site (see above), that’s still short of the service at peak times (and one would assume that, absent an outage, two days before Christmas might be one of those peak sorts of times).

The blog goes on to mention a few of the other lingering issues. “Please note that some features may not work as reliably as expected,” it said, adding that “peoples’ online status may be slow to update, and instant messages might not be delivered as quickly as they are normally. Group video calling will take longer to return to normal.”

Of course, all that is a lot better than yesterday, when the bulk of the service was down for millions of people.

UPDATE, 11:50 am: Things are looking up, according to the latest post from CEO Tony Bates. He reports that there are now about 16.5 million users online, about 80 percent of normal for this time of day. And a make-good offering is in the works. “I realise that it’s difficult to compensate you for not being able to talk to or see your friends, family or colleagues, but we’re planning to offer Skype Credit vouchers to all of our loyal paying customers to thank you for your continued support,” said Bates.

Here’s the video of his message:

UPDATE, 3:02 pm: Another dispatch from Bates, this time reporting that traffic volume is up to 90 percent of normal now, the system has been stabilized and the engineers think they know what went wrong (and it wasn’t a malicious attack). Bates also offered a few more details on the customer compensation plan. Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101223/skype-talks-about-just-how-full-that-half-a-glass-is/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:13:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1010 It’s now been at least 10 days since the Gawker group of Web sites was hacked by a group calling itself Gnosis in one of the side threads to the WikiLeaks controversy.

Within two days, sites like LinkedIn and later Blizzard Entertainment and Yahoo had advised their users to change their passwords.

The latest company caught up in all this is the New York Times. A little more than an hour ago, the Times sent an email to customers (see below) whose email addresses appeared in a searchable database of compromised Gawker commenting accounts, warning them that if they used the same password on nytimes.com as they did on Gawker, it would be a good idea to change it. There is no evidence of any funny business on the Times’ Web site.

Incidentally, in case you missed it, Gawker’s technology head, Thomas Plunkett, circulated a memo detailing what happened at Gawker and what it plans to do in response to the incident. One thing it will do is offer disposable commenting accounts that users can ditch easily, and for which storing an email address won’t be required.

Here is the email from the Times:

NYTimes.com Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM
Reply-To: nytdirect@nytimes.com

In case you missed our recent article “Gawker Sites Hacked and Passwords Compromised”
http://nyti.ms/hjNvlY we are writing to inform you that databases belonging to Gawker Media were compromised and hackers obtained more than one million user names, e-mail addresses and passwords.

While there is no evidence of suspicious activity on NYTimes.com we wanted you to know that
the e-mail address you registered with NYTimes.com matches an e-mail address that was on
the list of Gawker e-mail addresses and passwords that were published online.

If you use the same password for NYTimes.com as you did for Gawker, we strongly recommend you change your password. Changing your NYTimes.com password can be accomplished by visiting the Member Center page: http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter. After logging in to your account, click on the ‘change’ button associated with the password field which can be found under the Account Summary heading.

Here’s a Gadgetwise post with tips on developing a good password (in brief: do not make it a real word, keep it long and mix in an unusual combination of letters and numbers).
http://nyti.ms/gGR3kz

Please contact Customer Support at 1-800-698-4637 or e-mail customercare@nytimes.com with any questions.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/skype-details-problems-says-may-take-hours-to-fix/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/skype-details-problems-says-may-take-hours-to-fix/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:36:54 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1286 Amid a widespread outage on Wednesday, Skype said that it has identified the issue but cautioned it may take several more hours to resolve.

The issue, Skype said, is that its service, unlike a regular phone or even instant messaging service, relies on millions of individual connections, including many especially important computers known as “supernodes.”

“Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available,” Skype said in an explanatory blog post on its Web site. “Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.”

The company says the solution is the creation of–wait for it–”mega-supernodes.”

“Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal,” Skype said. “This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.”

The company thanked everyone for their patience and said to continue following @skype on Twitter for further updates.

Update, 1:10 p.m.: Skype said in an update posted to Twitter that things are slowly getting back up and running.

“Skype is now gradually returning to normal–we expect it may take several hours for everyone to be able to sign in again, however,” it said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101222/skype-details-problems-says-may-take-hours-to-fix/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:02:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1581 Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, it’s easy to assume that all social networks are designed primarily to connect friends with one another. But many of these networks—think Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn—aren’t focused on that. Instead, they provide information from strangers, business contacts and group postings on a variety of topics. Myspace is now also shifting in this direction after Facebook decisively overtook it as the most popular social network.

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:07:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=871 Groupon’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason has stolen the spotlight recently, by appearing on the “Today Show” and being interviewed on “Charlie Rose.”

But it’s hard not to make news when you turn down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.

Meanwhile, Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has remained relatively quiet. As the head of the second-largest company in the local, group-buying space, it wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to talk about.

Just about 24 hours before Groupon’s rejection leaked out, LivingSocial announced it had secured $175 million from Amazon, and $183 million in total new investments. In that same release, the Washington, D.C.-based company confirmed that it was booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

To be sure, Groupon and LivingSocial are pulling away from the pack when it comes to defining the nascent daily-deals market. O’Shaughnessy, who claims that the two have 90 percent market share combined, said: “I think the idea conceptually that you can buy things online and go interact with merchants in offline is starting to take hold and be widespread. But it’s really been less than two years…It’s definitely the first couple of innings right now.”

Here’s our interview with O’Shaughnessy:

eMoney: Give me an update on where your business is today.

O’Shaughnessy: As of yesterday [Dec. 16], we were in 136 markets. We launched five new markets yesterday. We tend to do them in batches, and five or eight will go out at once. Overall, we’ve been averaging a market a day.

What about up-to-date figures on uniques?

We are at more than 10 million, or I think the last number we said publicly was 12 million. That’s primarily Canada and the U.S. that are signed up for the daily deal. We are in five countries today. [LivingSocial is in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.]

What’s the competition like internationally?

Groupon has been acquisitive, and they’ve become established in lots of places. The U.S. is the most mature by a large margin, and there’s some countries with a few players that have established themselves, and finally, there’s some countries out there that’s a fairly green-field environment.

It’s fairly established that Groupon is No. 1, and LivingSocial is No. 2. But there’s a huge debate about who is No. 3?

There’s a pretty big gap. One of the things I’ve said is that it’s a pretty easy business to get into. All you have to do is know how to process a payment, and have a brother-in-law that has a restaurant that is willing to participate. But it’s a hard business to scale.

We have a competitive spreadsheet with 200 names on it, and if you do a couple of filters on how many deals someone has run, starting with 100, the vast majority drop off. And then if you up it to 500, you are up to the top two. It’s a pretty big drop-off.

Six months ago, we [Groupon and LivingSocial] collectively had 90 percent market share, and last month that was still true.

In that time, the market got bigger, and some others have grown for sure, but our market share has grown quite a bit. The signal-to-noise ratio is off, relative to who is doing what.

Is that what gives you confidence?

That’s one data point to look at, but what gives me confidence is what I see and I know we do every day. The degree of effort that goes into it and how many things can go wrong when you are managing merchant relationships, that’s what gives me the confidence.

What about the critics who say there’s no loyalty in this business–a consumer will always go with the provider who has the best deal for the business they want to visit.

There’s some loyalty that’s there, and I think people buy through us pretty regularly. They know that it’s going to be a merchant that’s vetted, and we work really hard at that. We are a good solid legit company that’s able to deliver. People place value on that. The brand matters, and enhancing user trust is an important thing.

What about the critics who say the margin will erode over time?

I think that the erosion of margins is just like any single other business if you stop innovating and do the same thing over and over. If we continue to innovate and provide additional value to merchants, the value per dollar increases. I don’t tend to be hugely concerned about the margin front.

The conduit has been 50 percent off a service, but there’s additional value we can provide to merchant communities and consumer communities. Overall, we aren’t not going to do the same thing over and over.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve started working with merchants in completely different ways, and sometimes we are going and operating events. We just did something called “tubbing and tasting,” where we worked with three merchants.

You could pick 10 to 12 Saturdays, and you’d meet in Midtown Manhattan, where a coach bus would take you to a snow hill, where you’d go snow tubbing. At the lodge, there was a bonfire and s’mores, and a beer tasting with a bunch of microbrews.

In that circumstance, we worked with three merchants–a coach company, a ski mountain and a brewery–in an entirely different way than how they associate with folks. I think it cost $60 and it sold out virtually every Saturday in January and February. I don’t see anyone else doing that, by finding unique hand-picked, curated ways to work with local businesses.

So, how will you be working with Amazon?

Right now, our first step is focusing on getting the relationship from a financial perspective locked down, and we’ll figure it out at a later point.

I assume the funding will go toward expansion?

We will be very aggressive on additional market launches as we build up our brand and user base. It’s very much a global game, and this is a global opportunity. We’ve gone from one country to five, and we’ll likely continue to expand globally.

A lot of this year was laying a foundation and the building blocks, and adding more value for the merchants, like LivingSocial Escapes. It’s on fire right now. It’s a weekend getaway, or a “staycation.” They are curated packages that are within a short driving distance from where you live. We also have LivingSocial Family Edition, which has things parents can do with their kids.

Your plans include tripling your employee count next year to 1,800 and more than doubling the number of cities you are in to 300?

We will continue to be pretty aggressive. Earlier this year, we were in six markets and we added 130 markets this year. We are a little more mature and one would hope that means we could move faster next year. We were around 30 employees, and over 600 now. It’s been a pretty crazy ramp-up.

The timing of your investment was so closely timed to Groupon-Google’s negotiations.

I’m a firm believer that we can’t control what other people do. Obviously, the deal we did with Amazon takes time to put together. We had decided awhile ago, if we want to become the biggest player in local commerce, we should be aligned with the biggest e-commerce company. That’s a lot of [what was] driving it. The timing was very coincidental.

So, no regrets?

No, not at all. We are thrilled and excited and expect to gain more market share over the coming year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/ http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:57:10 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=620 BuyWithMe confirmed today that its CEO, Cheryl Rosner, has left the company after only eight months on the job.

To get the skinny, we caught up with the company’s Interim president, David Wolfe, who was promoted from chief product officer as the company seeks a new leader. Wolfe would not elaborate beyond echoing the company’s statement that the decision for Rosner to leave was mutual.

However, Rosner’s departure hints at how nascent the market for daily deals and social/group buying is, and how there’s still work to be done to figure out the economics.

The year-and-a-half old Groupon competitor is no exception. If you aren’t familiar, BuyWithMe is often considered the third- or fourth-largest outfit in the group-buying space. The company, which recently moved to New York City from Boston, operates in 12 markets, and has raised $21 million in venture capital. It has 93 employees.

Wolfe acknowledges that a hiring spree is necessary to catch up to its nearest rivals, Groupon and LivingSocial, and that it will likely need more capital to continue its aggressive expansion plans. “The intent will be to raise more money; it’s a probable event,” he said.

As it is, BuyWithMe will likely miss this year’s goal of being in 15 markets by at least one. But generally, Wolfe says, that’s not the problem: “We are taking a step back. What is most important is for our emerging markets to grow to maturity, and for us to push them over the hump and increase our market share.”

Right now, he claims, BuyWithMe’s best performing market is its first: Boston. Trailing close behind is New York City and Washington, D.C., but the other nine are struggling to have a deal every day. “They are performing as expected, given the focus level and resource level we’ve given them….It’s less that we stumbled strategically, but we really spread ourselves too thin to get into multiple markets, and now we are focusing on making sure we are providing great service.”

Wolfe acknowledges the competition by saying it’s a hard space to build brand loyalty. Consumers will gravitate to the best deal every time, so they are focusing on creating loyalty with merchants. “Our focus is on making sure we are delivering an amazing service to our merchants and consumers. A lot of people have jumped into the game, and it’s a challenging business. It’s not a small feat to deliver [deals] on a consistent basis.”

Does Wolfe believe there’s room for more growth in the market–beyond the successes of Groupon and LivingSocial?

His answer is yes. “I don’t think even with Groupon’s amazing execution that we are even close. We see a lot of blue ocean and a lot of untapped eyeballs on the consumer side across a lot of locations. The excitement over the past couple of months is not the end stage. We are seeing first innings, where a transformational shift is occurring on how retailers reach consumers. That’s fundamental.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101208/exclusive-chegg-buys-cramster/ http://allthingsd.com/20101208/exclusive-chegg-buys-cramster/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:02:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38270

According to sources close to the situation, online textbook rental company Chegg has acquired Cramster, a social online homework help platform.

The Pasadena, Calif.-based Cramster is the leading online study community, offering expert Q&A help, study groups and practice tests and problems. College and high school students, teachers, professors, parents and other experts add information into the network on a large range of subjects.

It was founded in 2002 and now has one million members, using either a free or premium service.

The Cramster purchase is one in a series of start-up acquisitions that Chegg has been making of late, part of a strategy to be a central place for student needs.

In late September, the company bought CourseRank, a Mountain View, Calif., start-up that helps students share course schedules, take classes with friends, and read and write reviews on classes and professors, as well as find out how professors grade.

To expand, Chegg has raised a whopping $220 million in funding from a number of venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins.

That’s because Chegg has become the front-runner in the increasingly competitive online textbook rental space, as it seeks to disrupt the $10 billion college textbook business.

Chegg got its start in 2005 at Iowa State University as a classified rental service, where books were the dominant item, but evolved its business to focus on actually doing the textbook rentals.

The company’s unusual name, Chegg, is a mashup of “chicken and egg,” and its model is similar to that of innovative video rental outfit Netflix.

Chegg now serves close to 7,000 schools across the U.S.

Typically, renting a book costs a fraction of what buying one outright does. It is ordered online and then sent to a renter, who then returns it.

Terms of the Cramster deal were not clear.

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