Gawker: valleywag, odeo

How much would you pay for Odeo?

Chris Mohney — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:00:53 EST

Now that Evan Williams and co. have decided to focus on mobile social net Twitter, they're putting MP3-o-rama Odeo on the block. Williams ruminates on the oddness of a low-key blog sale of a subsantial net property, since the offered lot of "odeo.com and studio.odeo.com, including all code, the domain, brand, database of three million MP3s, etc." is just a chunk of tech and data (no company or business is included). Williams feels strongly enough about Odeo that he bought it back from investors. Despite "some conversations with potential buyers," he must be looking for something more. But what?

Net music is getting too big and complicated for anyone but the giants. Podcasting oversaturates its distribution channels and audience on a daily basis. On the other hand, Odeo's simple bundle of code and database might make it more attractive to a larger company that just wants to bulk up with some audio content. The real question is: How much would you pay for this? Assume you had the means and interest to cough up something both practical and reasonable, then make your offer. We'll compare results versus each other and the actual sale price, if any.

[SCOOP] Odeo Buys Back Soul

rabruzzo — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:01:00 EDT

Odeo, a podcasting site started by Evan Williams, who already made a tidy little fortune selling Blogger to Google, is buying back the share owned by investment firm Charles River Ventures. A source told Valleywag, Evan made the decision to dump investors (the venture capitalist aren't happy), which leads us to believe Williams still greatly cares about the company and has plans for Odeo's future. The source also says Evans never needed the money but was scared not to take it, and Charles River is now shopping around for a new podcast companies to invest in.

[Odeo]
[Charles River Ventures]

Loose Wires: $10 million? Yelp!

Nick Douglas — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:16:30 EDT

"Google Determined To Reintroduce Goatee To NYC." Incontrovertible photo evidence inside. [PSFK]
Audioblogger, the blog-by-phone service from Odeo, stopped returning my calls. Was it something I said? [Odeo via Kingsley Jegan Joseph]
ComScore reports that over half of MySpace's users are over 35— [ComScore]
—which one ad exec immediately refutes. [John DeMayo]
"Does anyone know anything about social networking?" asks a blogger at paidContent. Yes, he says, if we try modeling it after the oil industry. Gee, that's promising. [paidContent]
Naughty bloggers find instances of coders gone mad by using Google Code Search to find instances of "WTF" and "pray it works." [Supr.c.ilio.us]
Yelp is great and all, but why did it take another $10 million in funding? Where did the other $6 mil go, was it all stuffed down the g-strings of the girls getting wild at the startup's crazy parties? [VentureBeat]

Flipmeat roundup: Odeo, Friendster, organic humans

ndouglas — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 10:12:04 EST

Yahoo may buy Odeo. Seems destined, no? [TWiT via Unofficial Yahoo Weblog]
Google may buy Friendster. Main difference between Friendster and Orkut? At least Orkut has Brazilians. [SiliconBeat]
The NYT already bought news aggregator/annotator BlogRunner. So now writing the Times will cost you too. [PaidContent]
Man and machine may merge. Give it 40 years. [KurzweilAI.net]
Draper Fisher Jurvetson is funding Tagworld, another pretty-faced Myspace wannabe. [TechCrunch]

Some implications up there for the Valleywag Flip Trifecta — send in your buyout trifecta before Odeo sells and it's too late!