Comcast Acquiring Social Networker Plaxo

Comcast will announce their acquisition of social contact list Plaxo today. Financial terms are not being disclosed, but the purchase price is between $150 and $170 million. Plaxo, which was founded in 2002, has raised just under $30 million in venture capital. The two companies have already been working together for a year, with Plaxo powering the address books used for Comcast’s 14 million high-speed data subscribers. Schwartz, president, Comcast Interactive Capital and EVP, CIM: “As we continued to look at making that partnership even deeper, we’ve been thinking about the things we could do to supercharge each other’s product and really believe there’s a unique opportunity in a marriage.” He puts the opportunities in two categories: the technology Plaxo has been building for seven years as it morphed from address book to sharing online activities through its social Pulse product and Comcast’s activities with interactive set-top boxes, building Comcast.net, expanding with the launch of Fancast.com, the acquisition of Fandango and more. “All those things when you tie them together, both sides can really provide a lot more endpoints for making that a valuable social service. Every social network does better the more endpoints it has and the information it has flowing through it.” As an example, he offers the web-based way people share photos through Plaxo now and a vision for the future. “We’re going to enable photos to be viewed on your TV set, for example, through your set-top box. We have 25 million homes that get Comcast video. That means if your grandmother would prefer to see her family photoson the TV set you can pop up a note that says, ‘You have new photos from your son Ben.’ ... We can use this as a social media backbone for all of Comcast’s endpoints. We announced some things recently in the wireless area. This will apply to that.” When I asked if he was referring to the Sprint-Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) WiMax JV (Comcast is an investor), Schwartz said, “That’s a longer-term vision. The nearer-term stuff is what we can do with the set-top and what we can do with our other internet properties.... taking the existing network and making it more powerful. There aren’t too many other social networks that cross over to the TV set, certainly at that scale.”
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-comcast-plaxo-behind-the-deal/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/14/confirmed-comcast-bought-plaxo-deal-closed-today/