Yahoo to Acquire Xoopit for About $20 Million | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo to Acquire Xoopit for About $20 Million

kara.allthingsd.com

39 pointsblazamos14 comments

I'm happy for the founders (not sure about the VCs...couldn't have made much if $6.5M raised) but for the life of me don't understand why it's worth $20M. I was an early user of Xoopit (for Gmail) and uninstalled it after a week. Using search was faster and easier.

Edit: at least for Gmail, Labs can easily add Xoopit's functionality.

Never underestimate the huge mass of non-technical people on the internet. I found it refreshing to stop by wifi-enabled cafes and just LOOK at what people where doing online. You will be surprised.

This would be the killer app for my mother who uses her GMail account to store photos people send her to her ISP email where the quota is low. But, she uses Internet Explorer, despite my attempts to convert her to Firefox. This is great bait.

With productivity apps you're selling to two audiences: 1) the actual end user, and 2) the tech geek who is set to choose an appropriate application for the end user.

From my experience, stuff like AVG anti-virus, Adaware, Spybot S&D and LogMeIn started spreading from the ground up, spearheaded by tech support guys and the token kid in the family who is "good with computers". As more and more elderly and non-technical people move to web applications (and not just websites) you will see a new category of bi-targeted applications that help tech savvy people "help" and "reach" their non-geek family and friends. Case in point, YOU looking for stuff for your mother (note this new stuff is a "web app" :-)

Web app marketing will need to shoot from a double-barrel, and a new style of "Easy enough for your boss/family to use" marketing will have to be born.

Given liquidity preferences, it is more likely that founders did poorly than VCs did.

Assuming VCs received the $6.5M before proceeds and let's say the VCs owned 50% and each of the 2 founders 10%, that comes out to $1.35M per founder. Not bad for 2 years work (plus learning, reputation, etc.).

At 1x preferences.

Sounds right to me.

I actually was talking about the general case. I can't imagine it'd be often that a VC gets the short end..

Bought to motivate people to start developing/integrating with yahoo mail.

It would be interesting if Yahoo mail took a labs approach and then opened it up to the development community. Gmail labs has some great features. But I would love to be able to directly interface with an API as opposed to hacking together an extension.

If they wanted to motivate that much they could have started their own YC like program for Yahoo Search/Mail etc... development.

Yahoo will take forever to integrate. Mail is an enormous system. I cannot imagine this will go well or quickly.

Goodbye, Xoopit, we hardly knew you.

Good to know that Yahoo has 20 million to blow while laying off another 5% of their workforce.

You got that from techcrunch? They made it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com