Tucows finalized the acquisition of Boulder based NetIdentity today in a deal worth about $18M. NetIdentity owns the rights to a large collection of domain names for surnames and provides personalized email, blogging and web hosting services for these names. Think Joe@Smith.com (purposely not linked to save this poor bastard the deluge). Tucows has developed a channel that reaches more than 50 million end users worldwide, and they must believe they can sell these services to those users. NetIdentity has been doing so profitably lately, so it’s not a bad assumption.
As Brad feld points out, this is the fifth Boulder company to be acquired in just the last few months. Two of them (NetIdentity, Sketchup) were based smack in the middle of Pearl Street. Hopefully this will further fuel the idea of startup central.
Tucows has published a nice explanation of the deal here. There’s also a (tedious) podcast explaining the deal.
(via Feld.com/blog)
Thanks for the writeup David.
As part of the transition, Tucows is going to try and open some of the windows and doors on the operation and try to be a little bit more transparent and communicative. As a first step in that direction, we’ve launched a NetIdentity/Nameplanet/Domain Direct weblog that we’ll be using to stay in touch with our clients more effectively. You can find it here (http://info.netidentity.com)
Sorry ’bout the podcast – we’re still learning what works and what doesn’t. That was primarily an investor communication, which puts some pretty strong constraints around what we can and can’t do, say and can’t say. Hopefully now that the serious stuff is out of the way, we can loosen up a bit. Feedback like this is helpful! 🙂
Thanks again,
-ross
Thanks for the comment Ross. No need to aplogize for the podcast. The quality of the broadcast was high – i was just pointing out that it might be a bit long for those who are not fully vested in the transaction to sit through. As you point out, it was targeted at investors and I think it suited its purpose very well. Good luck with NetIdentity going forward!
If you look at the blog mentioned by Ross, you will see comments from a LOT of unhappy subscribers who are not pleased with the result of the acquisition:
http://info.netidentity.com/