Congratulations to the gents at Bubbleshare – this past week they were acquired by Kaboose.
Kaboose, you’ve picked up an amazing team (great people, great ideas, great execution – the triple threat) and a fantastic product. I’m looking forward to seeing what Albert and Chris can put together with the integration. Chris, try not to get too freaked out by the cubicles ;>
webHancer, a company I was employed with for its first few years of existance, has been purchased by Microsoft. Congratulations to Chris and the rest of the crew who hung in there through the tough years to see this happen.
Seeing Upcoming.org fold into the Yahoo empire raises mixed emotions. I’m happy to see social, open events be given attention by one of the major players – and the Upcoming.org team seemed like great folk when I last interacted with them a few years ago. Early on they were amenable to serving events in iCal format so they could be consumed by clients such as eventSherpa (our product at Semaview).
On the other hand, it saddens me that we were unable to maintain momentum with eventSherpa – and that our early work didn’t live on to help the social, open, syndicated events movement.
I was excited to see the creation of the Metabrainz Foundation recently. A few years ago I spent a bit of time examining the MusicBrainz project while investigating semantic technologies (MusicBrainz utilizes RDF for its Web Services).
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.
Similar to Wikipedia, MusicBrainz is built by its legion of users. An important and open project – MusicBrainz is a foundation for building new music related applications.
Their board of directors consists of some people I’ve worked with in past and others that I read everyday. I’d urge you to donate a little something, just as I did yesterday.
It has been going around the blogosphere today that bloglines has been sold to AskJeeves. Although bloglines is my software of choice for RSS consumption, I had wondered about their business model moving forward. A merger seemed inevitable – I can only hope that the integration doesn’t ruin what I consider to be one of the best free services availabile on the Web.
Now that AskJeeves has aquired Bloglines, I await a response from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.