Summize Likely Acquired by Twitter - ReadWriteWeb. Well placed rumor has it that microblogging service Twitter has acquired search engine Summize. Jason Calacanis appears to have made the first public statement about it, though it may have been blogger Josh Chandler as well. We'd put less stock in were it not that Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is getting positive signals on the deal and would not likely have pulled the trigger on the story were it nothing but a fleeting rumor. Summize is one of the most interesting services on the web today, both for its feature set and its history.
Started as an academic research project by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Summize is today headquartered in Virginia. Chowdhury was the AOL employee who posted 650,000 AOL customers' search queries for researchers to analyze in 2006 - kicking off a storm of debate about data privacy that still rages today. What Summize Does Summize calls itself a tool for "conversation search," and that's a well deserved tagline. Market Context. Twitter May Buy Summize. Comment on sun taking over mysql.
Is Second Life An Acquisition Target? No. Predictions for 2009. Or at least the remaining 97.5% of it. Meant to get these posted a few days ago, but better late than never. So after last year's 0.600, onward to the 6th round of fearless predictions for the year ahead: 1) Second Life will return to steady growth and have a shockingly good 2009 By shockingly good, let's say 50% growth in concurrency and James' measure of active users. Why do I expect SL to rock 2009? 2) Another Republican Senator leaves his party to become an independent, largely caucusing with Senate Democrats. As the Republic party tries to differentiate and reinvent itself in 2009, I see some moderate Republicans facing very interesting decisions about their political futures. Let's make a few things clear. 4) Across the industry, 2009 global recorded music sales contract by low single digit percentages, pulled down by double digit physical sales drops but buoyed by large digital gains.
Pretty self explanatory. 5) Linden Lab gets acquired.