San Francisco-based video startup Jumpcut which launched back in April announced today that it has been acquired by Yahoo!. It will be now be a part of the social media family of Yahoo! – joining del.icio.us and Flickr — and tightly integrate with Yahoo! Video to give it web-based video remixing and editing facilities that it itself is known for. While the financial terms were undisclosed, I would roughly estimate this to be in the $3 – $7 million range.
This is the second acquisition of a video startup following Sony’s $65 million call to Grouper, and I think there are more to come. While the major companies are busy catching up with the trends (MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, all come to mind), these private startups are the ones that are really innovating. As a matter of fact, Yahoo! was apparently working on their own remixing and editing feature for Yahoo! Video before this acquisition. If it had panned out, would they really be needing Jumpcut now?
An important part of Web 2.0 and the whole new web culture has been mashups and remixing — whether it’s a Ning app, YouTube video or Google Maps — and this more than anything safely completes Yahoo!’s goal to be a successful contributor in this growing space. But there’s one thing I’d highly request Yahoo! to do, which is to integrate your products. Currently, each is doing their own thing – it doesn’t even make sense to have Yahoo! Photos existent while you have Flickr or not make del.icio.us and Upcoming.org talk to each other. Why not make this family a true family? After all, you have paid millions for them.
[tags]Yahoo!, Online Video, Jumpcut[/tags]
