Tucows purchases Kiko
Kiko put itself up for auction last month on eBay, hoping to sell itself after going absolutely nowhere as a Web 2.0 company. Just like so many others….
They ended up selling for around $258,000.
The buyer, we now learn, is Tucows, the Canadian internet company best known for their domain registration services.
Why did they do it?
Their CEO, Elliot Noss, has this to say:
While there are a lot of little reasons, I’ll cover a few of them in a moment, there is really one big reason why we bought Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.
Elliot goes on to discuss the calendaring functions that Kiko has and how long it would have taken them to build this into their email systems… and he makes a great point in wrapping up the discussion:
First and foremost this was about better/faster. We were able to get a key feature done well, and done now. In my view we were lucky with a number of the small things that made this happen.
Looks like they made a strong analysis of how long it would take them to build the functionality that Kiko offered into their email solution – and how much that would cost them – and made a business decision based on that analysis.
With that in mind, they likely made a good decision to purchase Kiko.. I’m just glad that it wasn’t another money losing attempt to associate a company with the whole Web 2.0 genre…
I’d say that Tucows is best known as the shareware hosting directory, but maybe that’s just because I’m 135 internet years old.
Anyway, pretty solid reasoning from the Tucows chaps.
Is tucows still around?
I remember them in the good ol’ days of web 0.5 :-)