Comcast to Aquire Plaxo

[David Sandusky]

Plaxo made the official announcement today about the pending acquisition by Comcast. As I build a multi-media company and using both companies here for a long time, I am interested in this. Some of my "stuff" is in a comcast online beta tool for business clients (don't know what is going on there). But non-the-less, the below announcement is interesting to me, but not a surprise. Read and comment in this thread your thoughts to mega-media buying social media.


Read Q&A about the acquisition

May 14, 2008 — Big doings at Plaxo today! We are really excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo: We have just signed an agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services (and our largest customer and partner).

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been — and will continue to be — a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication. All of our 50 employees will continue to innovate on and grow both our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse. And through additional integration projects with Comcast, we’ll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own. We are developing an exciting roadmap with Comcast that includes socially enabling the media experience in places such as Comcast’s high traffic portal (Comcast.net),CIM’s popular interactive entertainment properties (such as Fancast and Fandango), and the television.

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making "social media" a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from "network effect," which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

Continued Protection of Your Privacy and Support for Interoperability
Plaxo has always been a strong advocate of giving users ownership and control of their data. We protect our users’ data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will continue. We will continue to work toward greater interoperability and data portability, with the user at the center and in control. Comcast has a similarly strong privacy policy, and we are both committed to ensuring that the protections users have come to expect will continue.

In Conclusion
Finally, we’d like to extend an enormous thanks to the people who have helped Plaxo reach this point — our millions of loyal customers, our patient investors and advisors, and the extraordinarily talented group of employees who have worked so hard to bring us to this point.

So, whether you’ve been a part of the Plaxo network for a long time, joined recently for Pulse, or have just followed us from the sidelines, we appreciate your interest in the Plaxo story. We are excited to open a new chapter today.

Ben Golub, CEO
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products