Google Acquires TNC (Tatter and Company)

Google acquired TNC today. Congratulations to Chester and Chang!

TNC is a Korean blogging platform is similar to Automattic. This acquisition will help Google gain more traction in a market where it barely breaks the top ten of search engines and is the 5th largest online ad market in the world.

I met Chang and Chester a couple years ago and now a co-organizer with Chang and a few others on Open Web Asia '08, which is first pan-Asian web technology event.

Chang has more here, "We've been Googled!"


UPDATE: VentureBeat, "Google buys Korean blogging software platform TNC, one of first purchases in Asia" and Mashable, "Google Starts Shopping in Korea; Buys Blog Platform Maker TNC," picked this news up.

Acquisition Day

A couple big acquisitions in the tech space today.

First, Oracle finally buys BEA for approximately $8.5 billion. Oracle is not sexy, but Larry Ellison manages to keep feeding the beast and making it sexy enough.

"Surprise! Oracle buys BEA Systems"

Next huge play is Sun acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. Congratulations to Mårten Mickos (CEO), Monty Widenius (Co-founder),and David Axmark (Co-founder)! I hope everyone was well rewarded.

"Helping Dolphins Fly" Jonathan Schwartz's post on this.

"Sun acquires MySQL; Adds to its software stack"

Google Acquires YouTube... Was It Worth It?

I guess the question is, "Will it be worth it?"  It's difficult to place a value on such deals and many times you can only eyeball whether it was a good or bad deal a few years down the road.  I'm sure part of the incentive for Google was to lock out Yahoo! and other competitors from acquiring YouTube.  Imagine if Yahoo! acquired YouTube?  Google would always be second or worse in an ad space that has higher CPMs/CPCs than text AND seems to be the next big growth segment of online advertising. 

If there could be such a controlled competitive field for Google, I'm sure they would have strongly considered to battle it out with YouTube and the rest of the field.  How long would it have taken for Google to catch up especially since they seem to be maturing and focusing their resources more strategically now?

Anyway, here is the official press release.  Dissenting view from Mark Cuban.  Posts from Michael Arrington, where he brings up some good points on Google's relationship with Fox, and PaidContent.org has more here:

- Stock for stock transaction (for $1.65 billion)
- YouTube will operate independently to “preserve its successful brand and passionate community”.
- YouTube will continue to be based in San Bruno, CA, and all YouTube employees will remain with the company.
- The number of Google shares to be issued in the transaction will be determined based on the 30-day average closing price two trading days prior to the completion of the acquisition.