Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

eBay Buys Hunch

EBay has purchased Hunch, a recommendations engine that’s supposed to figure out what users like, based on their tastes and affinities.

Michael Arrington, who broke the news this morning, pegs the purchase price at “somewhere around $80 million.”

Hunch, led by high-profile CEO Chris Dixon and, for a time, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, had raised around $20 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners; last year, the company had reportedly mulled a Google deal for around $60 million. The purchase is one in a string of start-up acquisitions for eBay.

Here’s a 2010 interview with Dixon and Fake, conducted by Kara Swisher:

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”