I was reading Techcrunch this morning, and thinking about the nature of Internet business at this point in time.
The lead story as I write this is “Yahoo! Acquires Contest Site Bix.” The intro says a lot:
“Online karaoke and contest site Bix has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo! Bix CEO Mike Speiser will continue running Bix but will also take on responsibility for product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community… Speiser was previously the founder of Epinions. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com (then DealTime.com) in 2003, which in turn was acquired by Ebay in 2005.”
Acquisitions followed by more acquisitions, with the same household names involved. So is the excitement around the portential of Internet startups reliant on them being acquired by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, eBay and the like?
Further down the page are details about the Techcrunch Party in New York this week. Is this a sign of genuine opportunity or hype overwhelming the true cultural shifts going on with the web? I am just comforted by the fact that:
“If you cannot make TechCrunch Meetup 8, don’t despair! You can also follow the party online or through your mobile.”
Now why didn’t we have that for my High School Prom? Also unlike my prom, the Techcrunch party has 28 sponsors. Are all of these sustainable companies, or does each offer a unique way to do a single feature – one that will eventually be bought up by Google, and serve as a small part of their product suite?