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Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

techcrunch.com

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Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#61

Post by axod »

paul wrote: post #39
seiji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example). It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Goo…

You just want to world to recognize you as "having merit" and give you money? You want to be successful, but are unwilling to make any sort of effort? Create something remarkable and people with money will find you.

Surely that assumes people with money are good at spotting 'worth'...

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#62

Post by axod »

coffeemug wrote: post #51
seiji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example). It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Goo…

Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. What you may not realize is that everyone is knowable if you put enough effort into it. If you have no drive and no talent, rich people won't be able to help you. There aren't that many driven and talented people out there, so if you're one of them, and you make an effort to meet rich people, they'll help you too.

I think the problem is that some people (Me included) would rather spend all energy making stuff people want, rather than schmoozing people who might buy you. But I do see your point.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#63

Post by shafqat »

jackowayed wrote: post #9
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #2

What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?

One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question. For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL". In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person…

Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with "SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#64

Post by heyrhett »

me: Why did google pay so much money for Aardvark, the company made by the mechanical zoo? aardvark: Got it. I'm sending your question to someone who knows about Aardvark.

(Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) Sent at 2:51 PM on Thursday aardvark: (Update: No response yet from people who know about Aardvark -- but I'm still looking. Type 'tag:' followed by a different category to try other people.) Sent at 3:01 PM on Thursday aardvark: (An answer just arrived... From Derek P./28/M/Brookville,PA, Re: Aardvark) That's what I'm trying to find out. I tend to hate services like this, that are for people too dumb to Google. ... WAIT A MINUTE?! (To reply, type 'Derek:' followed by a message, or type 'flag' if this answer is inappropriate. Type 'more' for options.)

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#65

Post by axod »

Timothee wrote: post #46
seiji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example). It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Goo…

There's some truth to what you're saying (I'm afraid), though a lot of it is more general than just "rich people will help you get rich". You'll learn more around smart people and you'll be more likely to be a criminal if your friends pull you into it. But overall your negativity throws me off a bit. One definitely notices when a company with many ex-Googlers is bought by Google. But if you think that's how the world…

I think you're missing the irritation though.

Surely it's like the girl who sleeps with the boss gets a promotion. Sure, if you want a promotion you could sleep with the boss too, but it'd be nice if everything was just fair and done on merit. Not everyone wants to sleep with the boss.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#66

Post by derwiki »

seldo wrote: post #56
derwiki wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The map part seems like an easily switchable component, and the bulk of Yelp is the community and the reviews themselves. Also, I think other parts of Yelp use Bing and Yahoo maps.

Sure, but my point is that Yelp's core tech of storing venue information, ratings and reviews is not "hard" -- Google and Yahoo both have services that do this. But it beats the pants off of them because its user interface and social dynamics encourage better data.

I'll definitely agree with that. Google seems to have a hard time creating a community with their offerings.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#67

Post by stanleydrew »

mixmax wrote: post #59

Assuming VC's got 30% of the company that's a payout of $15 million from an investment of $6 million giving a little more than 100% a return on investment. These numbers are educated guesses of course, but it doesn't seem like the VC's got a lot out of this. Normally it's expected that the homeruns give a 1000% return on investment.

150% ROI to be exact, which is more than "a little more than 100%," but certainly not the order of magnitude more the VCs were probably looking for. Based on your assumptions though, is it fair to say the founders probably exerted quite a bit of control over when to sell, and if so why do you think they would do that? Desperate to return to Google? ;)

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#68

Post by jackowayed »

shafqat wrote: post #63
jackowayed wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question. For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL". In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person…

Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with "SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.

I know, it's not brilliant, but SSL wasn't in a particularly special place in the sentence or anything that would make it easy for a computer to figure it out. Compare that question to something like "I am using Rails. How do I ...?", where a computer would have a pretty easy time of figuring out that Rails is important with some simple parsing logic.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#69

Post by Timothee »

rwebb wrote: post #52
Timothee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though in their case, with 4 founders, $6M invested and a $50M exit, it's not "that much" money. I wouldn't spit on it obviously, but considering some of these guys' former positions at Google, they had probably made a good amount from stocks and such. What I'm trying to say is that it's probably in the same order of magnitude of their worth before that.

this thread of comments is laughably naive.

Do you mind elaborating? You know something I don't, obviously.

Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

#70

Post by ashishk »

icco wrote: post #5
ashishk wrote: post #4

I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.

I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.

It's good with niche questions that only a human could help with. I've had luck with social questions ("where's the yscraper located?") and tech questions ("why's my jscript [code here] breaking in IE6?"). It's like stackoverflow, but "real-time" and not limited to coding questions only.
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