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Comcast announced Wednesday that it will acquire social
network site pioneer Plaxo. The deal is valued somewhere around $135million to
$175 million, and is intended to make the social portal part of Comcast
Interactive Media. Plaxo will remain located in Silicon
Valley and one of the things it could do is work with Comcast’s
Fancast Internet to facilitate users’ access to the internet service provider’s
movies and TV shows database.
Comcast and Plaxo have been partners since early last year,
and have been working together on integrating e-mail and voicemail via the
SmartZone service. The takeover will also help Comcast in offering social
network links to the devices connected by it, from video recorders to TVs and
even to wireless equipment. This way, Comcast subscribers may be offered the
possibility to share videos or photos through these devices by using the company’s
service.
Plaxo was one of the companies that first saw the social
possibilities that lay in the address books of the users and has put the
foundations of the concepts that other networking sites such as Facebook work.
However, the start was slow and the company got a bad reputation because it
used to flood peoples’ inboxes every time one of the persons in their address
book made an update to his or her profile.
The company founded in 2001 by Todd Masonis, Cameron Ring
and Sean “Napster” Parker says it has 15 million registered users, although it
has never turned a profit.
Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger
Venture Management, and Cisco Systems as well as former Yahoo Chief Executive
Timothy Koogle have backed the company with more than $20 million over the
years. The social network pioneer has also worked on different projects with
big companies like Google, Microsoft or Apple.
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