Re: Backflip, desktop.com, portal acquisitions
>>steve harmon wrote:
backflip - this privately-held company does look very interesting, a new twist on personal web portals
yahoo or aol should acquire them now if they want to prevent a rival from growing
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I think it's a great company. I hear it was founded by some Netscape refugees. I've been using it for the last couple of months. Because I have a few hundred bookmarks on computers and at bookmarksplus.com, it's really saved my ass. For example, I recently conducted some follow-up research on Packeteer (PKTR) for my job but I couldn't remember where I bookmarked it. Did a keyword search on Backflip and...BOOM, there it was. I've actually went so far as to email a bunch of my co-workers at Morningstar.com, telling them how useful it is.
But the truly 'killer' feature they're working on is tracking and indexing **every site you've ever visited**. A personalized cache! A personalized search engine! Sure, this will have privacy advocates up in arms. But I've always been one to sacrifice privacy for convenience/productivity/commerce. Unless, of course, I know it will be abused by companies irresponsible about this (e.g. RealNetworks, Network Solutions).
Beyond the obvious value proposition (d'oh, jargon) for the customer, think about the world of possibilities for Backflip. There's so much targeted information derived from a full history. Even if they can't leverage it due to privacy concerns, the level of personalization makes it extraodinarily sticky and can be combined with a suite of other personlization tools. The power of an Alexa Internet combined with the focus of a my.yahoo.com. It looks like a winner to me.
That's a good point Steve - about a portal acquiring such a company. I'm still a bit baffled with why portals haven't acquired sites like desktop.com, clickmarks.com. If the network is the computer, portals should reap the benefits.
Any other portal targets? Infomediaries/agents (Privaseek, mySimon, and enonymous) still look appealing.
In response to the original poster, LABMAN, you say Backflip's expected to be a "very hot ipo in march 2000". If they have filed with the SEC please, point me out to the filing, because I don't see it. If they haven't filed yet, they will not have an offering in March.
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