I really can't understand this.
Do I just not understand how the "game" is played. OR am I just missing something? Someone please enlighten me!
Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
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Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#12Hard to believe that someone is willing to pay $200 million for Klout. Maybe, I am missing something?
Just for fun, a year back, I made a simple Klout clone which was dependent on just Google search results, twitter followers, retweets and total number of tweets. I used a few known Klout scores as the seed data and generated a simple Heuristic to calculate Klout scores. I then tested it with around 100 celebs and regular people. The scores were remarkably similar to Klout's actual scores.
What were the (Lithium Technologies) VC's thinking?
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#13Hard to believe that someone is willing to pay $200 million for Klout. Maybe, I am missing something? Just for fun, a year back, I made a simple Klout clone which was dependent on just Google search results, twitter followers, retweets and total number of tweets. I used a few known Klout scores as the seed data and generated a simple Heuristic to calculate Klout scores. I then tested it with around 100 celebs and reg…
Hopefully this was purely an acquihire and the product is being shitcanned.
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#14I really can't understand this. Do I just not understand how the "game" is played. OR am I just missing something? Someone please enlighten me!
Honestly, yeah, you probably don't understand how the game is played if that is a legitimate question.
There seems to be a wave a social-related acquisitions going around. If you have a product that can be virally shared, or produces rankings or scores that people get caught up in competing for, you could be a potential acquisition target.
I think a lot of people on HN focus on solving real problems and making the world "better", which is certainly a wonderful endeavor. But that's not the path to mind-numbingly high acquisitions most of the time.
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#15“Lithium Technologies, a provider of social customer experience solutions for the enterprise.” I feel like it doesn't matter if you build something amazing. Without the pedigree, you wouldn't be acquired for 200M by a social customer experience enterprise solution.
Their mission might seem generic to you , but I hear they actually have synergistic agile processes with a laser focus on industry standard value-add technologies.
And by acquiring Klout, they now have Big Data in The Cloud!
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#16I was pretty sure this happened a month or two ago, but I guess it is now official: http://www.businessinsider.com/klout-acquired-2014-2
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Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#17Klout's Klout score just went up. They'd have gotten an even higher valuation if they'd authorized access to their to Klout's Facebook page.
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#18Ok trying to make sense of this,
So Lithium I understand. They make social media monitoring, analytics, management tools make sense.
Klout on the other hand? Besides it being a joke for most of us it's also I guess a huge database of potential customers and some smart engineers.
So Lithium paid $200M for a primarily some talent and a giant online rolodex?
Hmmm
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#19Klout's score leave a bad taste in my mouth. Like people actively trying to separate the cool kids by designer clothes or something. Also PG's thoughts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3887779) on it from two years ago still come to my mind because I too see powerful people skipped over completely by it. Eh.
Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies
#20Finally, an acquisition whose numbers make Whatsapp and Instagram look sane in comparison.