Ross Levinsohn, made a big splash a few months ago when he announced at an Under The Radar event that he had bought someone in the room. The news zipped across the Silicon Valley right on to my Power Book, just when the Business 2.0 Next Net panel got underway. In subsequent weeks everyone speculated, but now the news is final.
FIM has officially announced that it bought Newroo, and kSolo.com, which is sort of like an online karaoke service. I had heard about the kSolo deal, but could not nail down the specifics. Oh well…here it is. Mike has blogged the full press release. The deals are small - very small. (Nevertheless, FIM is being pretty active these days - Simply Hired investment, and now these deals.. will there be more to follow?)
Newroo is like a meme-tracker for everything and I got the demo from Dan Gould, and was suitably impressed. Levinsohn was impressed enough to spend a few million on the company which never got a chance to come out of stealth. I saw some prototypes build by Gould & Co, that would go well with the celebrity crazy MySpace crowd.
3 trackbacks so far
11:20 AM PT
kSolo - Social Karaoke…
3:05 PM PT
[...] Newsvine came out of stealth in November 2005. (Read, Introducing Newsvine.) I think we will expect more large media players will start buying these Web 2.0-Media start-ups as a way to bolster their web operations. News Corp. (NWS) was the first company to expand into social news when it acquired Newroo. [...]
8:00 PM PT
[...] there is “social news“? The social news trend has certainly gained some traction since News Corp. acquired Newroo. And now, last Friday, MSNBC (Microsoft and GE) bought Newsvine, another social news start-up. [...]
5 comments so far
11:04 PM PT
Ksolo is a really smart deal for newscorp. plays right into thier core audience and is very interactive. Also, dovetails nicely with the music orientation of myspace. Messrs. Murdoch, Levinsohn and Phillips are just way smart about this space and playing to win.
4:40 AM PT
I would appreciate any information on the reason behind the kSolo site being down (inactive) for two days now. We are receiving e-mails and phone calls from unhappy subscribers and would like to be able to respond intelligently as to the future of this site.
Thank you very much.
Dave Bean
fastdave57@yahoo.com
1:30 PM PT
can you tell me how come i cant get in to ksolo
4:53 PM PT
I have just paid my annual payment two days ago in ksolo.com. Why can’t my internet explorer connect to any of their site? It’s quite frustrating as it was not a small amount of money I have spent…
Please reply.
7:37 AM PT
Ok, what is wrong with KSolo? They haven’t had any new song releases since January. I am really disappointed in the site and have since cancelled my paid subscription with them. Could the new acquisition have something to do with it?
Leave a Comment