Yahoo has bought Jumpcut, a Flash-based online video editing site, for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced this morning. With the purchase, Yahoo gains another key buzzword for its web 2.0 acquisition porfolio: mashups.
This was a small purchase, and it’s interesting that didn’t come from Yahoo’s internal development efforts. Yahoo had, however, worked on its own video remixing tool internally. When I met Jumpcut earlier this summer, they had 11 employees, had raised $1 million in seed money, and were trying to close another round. Perhaps it has to do with Jumpcut’s fairly advanced experimentation with Flash, led by former Macromedia developer Ryan Cunningham.
Back at that interview last summer, when I proposed buying Jumpcut might be a good competitive edge for one of the online video sharing sites or portals, CEO Mike Folgner told me he’d wasn’t looking to settle down with just one company, rather to build partnerships with everybody. Ah well…I can understand how a Yahoo acquisition offer could be persuasive.
Jumpcut is very young; Folgner wrote the business plan early last year while at Stanford Business School, raised money in November, and put out the first product in April. Since then the company has cut deals with Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Atomic to get users interacting with professional content, in the first case through piecing together clips into a trailer, and in the second to submit audition clips for a casting call. Folgner was also in the process of signing deals to license music and export video to sites like Blogger, eBay, and TypePad.
And who will BUY Cuts Dot Com :-)
This is a very smart acquisition by Yahoo! It supports everything I believe that’s important about social media.
Now, hopefully Y! won’t mess this all up by overpaying for Facebook.
Nice piece, Liz!
I agree with Robert. Wow, smart move by Yahoo. Jumpcut is very, very cool and i think will be widely adopted by users particularly as Yahoo improves its 360 social network. Hats off to Yahoo for jumping on this one before someone else like MySpace or some other big media company ie: Viacom.
Eyespot could be another one, but I heard BabaMix has much better features and platform.
I think this was a great move by the folks at Y. Great feature set to drop into the rest of their offerings.
Yahoo is the new Microsoft: the company that can’t build anything on its own and has to buy technology. And Yahoo is demoralizing every employee when they do that, just like Microsoft did. Yahoo is going to have to start spending money to keep their employees from leaving to start start-ups that they can sell back to Yahoo, just like Microsoft did. Oh wait, Yahoo is already starting that.
Jumpcut’s a good service, I like Cavenger.com too