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Hacker News linked to a story by Crain’s New York, a site dedicated to covering New York’s business landscape, claiming the financial impacts brought on by Tumblr’s sale to Yahoo. The story claimed that the deal gave Union Square Ventures 5000% return on its investment on Tumblr based on analysis by research form PrivCo. It also laid out the numbers for Tumblr’s other investors, the actual of which are still undisclosed, that PrivCo calculated based on the information they gathered.
There’s a lot of speculation as to which direction will Apple take with the design of iOS after the company parted ways with Scott Forstall as new head honcho Jonathan Ive isn’t a fan of Forstall’s taste in aesthetics. Apparently Ive’s taste also differs from that of Steve Jobs as far as software design in concerned. This post from Tim Green argues that while the overall direction of the design world seems to be towards flat design as shown by Microsoft’s Metro look and Google’s flat interface, Apple doesn’t have to follow suit entirely.
The world has moved on from bulbous and shiny icons introduced by the original iOS version as evidenced by the latest app icons for Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter, Evernote, and many others. However, they haven’t been entirely flat, adopting characteristics different from Android and Windows Phone.
Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment looks back at the creation and development of Tumblr from 2007 until its acquisition yesterday by Yahoo. Arment, who left Tumblr in 2010 to focus on his own projects, sees a positive outlook from the deal, likening it to the YouTube deal with Google instead of Yahoo’s own Flickr, even though Flickr has persisted and just received its own renewed attention under current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. The unusually worded press release and blog post announcements from both Mayer and Tumblr CEO David Karp gave Arment a strong sign that this is not an ordinary deal and this will prove to be an important one for both Yahoo and Tumblr.
Tumblr’s adult fare accounts for 11.4% of the site’s top 200,000 domains, adult sites are a leading category of referrals. More here.
Gigaom reader Ashfaq Munshi responding to a blog post by Om Malik on how venture capitalists would react to a pitch by Nikola Tesla:
The problem is not just the VCs. Young people these days do not spend enough time thinking about the big picture. They are not taught the fundamentals or, more appropriately, they do not care about the fundamentals, because it is too easy to cut and paste in this open source world. How and why things work eludes most college graduates. ask them how something like a battery works, how a computer works etc and you get bizarre answers. Have one of the young hot shots explain to you caching, paging or garbage collection and they just don’t know. what they don’t understand is that for the past decades all that we have done is push computing bottle-necks around and that with the advent of new techniques or technology a new bottleneck (similar to that of perhaps a decade or two ago) will appear and create wonderful new opportunities. But, you have to understand the entire picture to see this happening. How many young people care to think this way? Not many I fear. my 23 year old tells me that guys of my generation know computing far better than those of his. Sad. Hard problems require depth, lots of work and plenty of time. Do the young people today have any desire for this? Unclear.The VC community does nothing to help this problem. A quick buck, spray and pray investing or lemming like investment, actually extinguishes the desire for creating. The key here is creating versus getting rich. After all betting on 10 startups with $500K investment in each is “more capital efficient” than one in which a $5M stake is necessary. Where has “venture” gone from venture capital?Does the world need so many Y-combinator clones? What if the purpose of an incubator was to run a year long contest for the most innovative idea that could be found and then have that idea funded at the appropriate level with proper coaching and guidance so it could succeed? would we be better off? I think so.Let’s think big, get our kids to think big and then place fewer bigger bets that will change our lives for good.
Prior to the confirmation of Yahoo’s deal with Tumblr, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg revealed that while on average he saw 400-600 blog post transfers from Tumblr to WordPress every hour, on Sunday that rate reached 72,000 posts in the hour preceding his post. As with news of platform acquisitions, exodus like this isn’t uncommon.
Mullenweg also said that at $1.1 billion, Yahoo scored a significant discount over the value of the acquisition over the coming years. In other words, he thinks the deal is a steal as Tumblr could easily create ten times that value in the next five years or so.
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!
We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.
Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.
In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.
As I’ve said before, companies are all about people. Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing. I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.
Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.
Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.
Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to…
Breaking: The Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the blogging site Tumblr. wsj.com
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 19, 2013
