Goongee Blog

Facebook is extending their reach with the Samwer brothers, German entrepreneurs that have bought into Facebook for an undisclosed sum.

“We are going to support the expansion of Facebook in Europe … We know the online space in Europe extremely well,” Samwer said in a telephone interview.

Samwer would not disclose the size of the investment, except that it was a “significant” amount, and less than the $240 million Microsoft paid for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in October, which valued the site at $15 billion.

“We think Facebook is, after Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research), the most innovative company to have emerged in the last few years. We think it will be the phenomenon for the Internet that Windows was for the desktop,” Samwer said.

This just means that world gets a little smaller and Facebook gets that much larger..

Reuters

Microsoft has recently announced their newest endeavor – bringing advertisements straight to grocer shoppers on their shopping carts. Microsoft worked with Plano, Texas-based MediaCart Holdings Inc. for four years developing the technology.

The purchase of aQuantive will deliver the technology to serve up relevant ads as a consumer shops at Wakefern Food Corp.’s ShopRite supermarkets on the East Coast.

This space age shopping program allows customers with “loyalty cards” to make their shopping list online and will bring it up with a swipe of their card. As the person shops and scans products, it will cross the items off the list. The cart will also keep a running total of your shopping trip.

The carts themselves will be outfitted with RFID tracking, so it can begin recognizing patterns shoppers have when shopping. This technology will also be used to generate ads that a shopper might use. For instance, it might bring up an ad for ice cream when you enter the frozen food aisle.

All of this sounds pretty space age to me, but I suppose it’s just a sign of things to come. It’s too bad they couldn’t program in more fruits and vegetables for people and cut out some of the junk – maybe they could help combat obesity while they are at it?

CNN

I was reading through some press releases this morning and found one about an upcoming domain auction. This is something I remember hearing about a few years ago, but put out of my head while building long term websites.

After reading the sites press, I decided to check out their website and see what it was all about. What they do is basically just auction off domain names – in most cases these websites aren’t even developed. I was actually sort of surprised to see what some domains were selling for. At one auction in Miami, Florida the domain computer.com (a pretty good domain name, for sure) sold for $2,200,000.00, the second highest auction was investment.com for $900,000.00.

It is definitely food for thought for enterprisers on the internet. A good domain name could fetch
a lot of money – and if the site is already monetized, it can sell for even more.

Have you participated in one of these domain auctions? What was your experience like?

Here’s another story of a web property selling at a premium. Penthouse recently announced that they have purchased Adultfriendfinder, an adult dating website for $500 million in cash and securities.

Penthouse bought Various Inc, which operates in total more than 25 online communities with a combined member base of some 260 million people. Its AdultFriendFinder site has more than 18 million members.

Penthouse estimates combined 2007 revenue after the deal of $340 million.

This should serve as inspiration to any webmaster that has dreams of building a web community, growing it out and selling it for a profit.

I expect to hear news of many other websites geared towards social networking going for a high P/E.

What are your thoughts on Penthouse’s acquisition?

Reuters

Revolution Health Group has agreed to purchase HealthTalk and will invest in SparkPeople, a website designed to help people set and achieve weight loss goals.

Company co-founder Steven Case had this to say about the decision to acquire these web properties.

“With HealthTalk and SparkPeople, Revolution Health Network is now the second largest health property on the Internet, generating more page views than MayoClinic, Everyday Health, Yahoo! Health, iVilliage Total Health and RealAge combined, putting us within striking distance of being number one,” said Case in a statement.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Yahoo Business

The FCC recently approved a bid for AT&T to purchase Ingenio, an advertising company. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

AT&T Inc bought Ingenio to boost its directories business and compete more directly with Google Inc. Ingenio’s technology, called “pay per call,” allows companies to post online advertisements and pay fees depending on how many phone calls they receive.

This should be interesting as Google has recently been trying to make inroads into the wireless business and currently offer mobile advertising options via their AdWords program. We’ll have to wait and see if this move by AT&T even touches them.

Reuters

Today there is great news for AdSense publishers in Argentina, Chile, China (mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines and Romania.

Google recently announced that they are now able to make payments to publishers in these countries via Western Union. This payment option will eliminate waiting for checks or paying high bank fees for processing. Publishers without bank accounts will benefit by being able to get paid.

“At Western Union, one of our strategic goals is to facilitate commerce and expand our service offerings around the world,“ said Royal Cole, Executive Vice President, Western Union Payment Services. “This unique program will bring the ease, convenience, speed and reliability of the Western Union brand to a new group of consumers – perhaps ones who’ve never used Western Union before.“

The program has been highly successful, Cole said, and plans are in the works to expand the program to additional countries by early 2008.

Western Union will also do the hard work of converting the payment into local currency, eliminating the need to convert the US payment.