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Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

techcrunch.com

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Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#41

Post by jgilliam »

betterlabs wrote: post #19

Max is awesome and I love his attitude. But I just never ever understood Slide. And why Google would buy Slide is equally difficult to understand, if not more. Are they buying technology? Or users (on Facebook!)? Or revenues (most likely not!)? Or Max and his team?

It's the same reason they partnered with Zynga. It's a backdoor way to get at large chunks of Facebook profile data for ad targeting.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#42

Post by apsurd »

jw84 wrote: post #5

What does Slide... do?

I think a lot of products are trivial. I don't use facebook. the slide slideshow thing looks ...stupid. But then I do understand that if you plague the entire internet with your "stupid" widget, you build a broadcasting platform. Even to the extent of that article about companies monetizing internet-user browsing profiles (beacons, 3rd party tracking cookies etc). Slide can make money installing these shady cookies across all of its trillion of pages. Sure don't know the actual numbers, but being a plague on the internet does have value.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#43

Post by muhfuhkuh »

BenS wrote: post #37
davcro wrote: post #29

This does not make sense. I am the developer of two Facebook apps, Friend Interview and Quiz Monster. I would argue those two apps are more valuable than Slide's and there is no way they are worth $182 million. What is Google buying?

Google is buying distribution across many social networks in lots of countries, and a team 100+ smart engineers and product designers.

That Slide has 100 any human beings working on essentially a slideshow flash widget, a couple embedded video players, and a patronizing knock-off social game is incredulous. If they can fetch that number, then whateverlife should've been worth a billion.

This may be where we see Hunter Thompson's high water mark for the Social Web, where the tides broke and rolled back.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#44

Post by staunch »

samratjp wrote: post #30
pjhyett wrote: post #22

I'll never understand why Max took his Paypal money and built an online widget company. Hopefully he'll attempt something meaningful next time.

Like his meaningful investing in WePay (which does seem meaningful) - http://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-is-pretty-excited...

Or Yelp.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#45

Post by basugasubaku »

pjhyett wrote: post #22

I'll never understand why Max took his Paypal money and built an online widget company. Hopefully he'll attempt something meaningful next time.

Slide was originally supposed to be a revolutionary way to organize and share photos. But they found monetization in the social network sphere and seemed to focus on that.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#46

Post by redorb »

evgen wrote: post #38
dotBen wrote: post #24

If $182m is the true price it's a total firesale. They raised $78m at a $500m valuation. With costs, liquidation preferences, etc I wonder if the common shareholders will see anything. Even BI is correct at $228m it's pretty slim pickings. My guess is Google want Levchin to be GM of the new Google social network (he has experience of social thru Slide and payments thru PayPal of course) and this is really a talent ac…

Isn't that toad from Microsoft who was previously heading up the Android effort the guy slotted to take over Google Me? As cute as Slide is I really don't see very much about it that screams "social"; its not much more social that Google Docs and if Google has any intention of playing in the next big game it has to do much, much better than this.

toad from microsoft?

Google Me? (its not named yet)

you make it sounds like your an insider and know these guys personally (if so correct me) but it just seems inappropriate.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#47

Post by mattmaroon »

Slide? Really? They couldn't have picked a much worse company to buy there, except RockYou. Slide got a bunch of users early by making Facebook apps that gave it functionality MySpace had like ability to post videos and photos to friends' walls. Those kinds of apps never monetized well, and all of that stuff unsurprisingly ended up on Facebook's roadmap anyway.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#49

Post by mlinsey »

I always thought that Levchin's PayPal experience would give Slide an opportunity to dominate the micropayments space that is generating so much revenue for competing social games companies. That thought wasn't very well fleshed-out (what specific advantages would it have given Slide? Was handling payments really a key pain point for Zynga et al?), but it still seems like a big missed opportunity to me.

Re: Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

#50

Post by jonknee »

ed wrote: post #3

$182 Million may sound like a lot, but remember that not too long ago this company was raising capital at a valuation of $2 billion . I expect there will be little cash, if any, left for employees after investor payouts.

If they bought in at $2B valuation wouldn't that just mean they lost money and there would still be whatever percent of the shares / $182m that weren't sold to the investor's left?
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