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Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:24 am
by dude81

Re: Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:38 am
by onion2k
How do you know they made big money?

Re: Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:49 am
by dude81
It is Google acquisition...

Re: Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 8:02 am
by onion2k
dude81 wrote:It is Google acquisition...
That's not how business works. Just because the buyer has loads of money doesn't mean they're going to pay a lot for something if they don't need to. ReCaptcha is a useful and interesting tool but it's not something that you could ever make much money from, so noone is likely to pay millions for it.

It seems more likely to me that CMU would have sold it for a small amount of cash or stock, plus the option to carry on developing it. That way it continues to be useful to them yet they don't have to pay for the costs of running it (servers, bandwidth, support, etc). I doubt they'd have held out for lots of money.

Re: Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:45 am
by arjan.top
maybe they wont pay millions for the technology, but they would pay millions for the user base

Re: Small tool

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:43 pm
by dude81
There you make my point. Even I was meaning that. :wink:

Re: Small tool

Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:04 am
by onion2k
arjan.top wrote:maybe they wont pay millions for the technology, but they would pay millions for the user base
I don't think Google need to buy a user base.

Re: Small tool

Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 5:39 pm
by alex.barylski
I agree, it's the user base most companies are after, even Google.

Re: Small tool

Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 7:25 pm
by Christopher
The interesting thing about ReCaptcha is that it solves two problems at once. It provides a Captcha for websites to use and it provides human translations of words that character recognition software could not identify. The latter is why Carnegie Mellon University created it and why it is of interest to Google. They provide some bandwidth for a service and get a lot of goodwill and statistics. And in turn they have millions of humans working on their book scanning project for free. I think it is good of them to not just create GooCaptcha and steal the market. That's what big companies, like Microsoft, have traditionally done.

Re: Small tool

Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:02 pm
by alex.barylski
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/ ... -takeover/
Neither company has revealed the full terms of the buyout, but Google is unlikely to receive much change from $500 million.
I'm guessing that is ballpark what Google paid...it does sound like a neat service I had no idea how it worked until I read the article on SitePoint :)

Re: Small tool

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:18 am
by onion2k
$500m Would work out to ~$5,000 per user. That's mental, even for Google.

Re: Small tool

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 1:45 pm
by alex.barylski
Thats business :P

Google might spend 5 million on a advertising campaign for a similar service, not to mention the cost to build the software, etc. Then there is the very real possibility, that no one bites. It actually makes cost effective sense to just buy out a company like reCAPTCHA, IMHO.

It's a guaranteed investment. :)

Re: Small tool

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:04 pm
by califdon
Gee, when I read the Subject of this topic, I thought it was off-topic, but we don't have a Medical Issues forum . . .

Re: Small tool

Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 7:08 am
by onion2k
PCSpectra wrote:Thats business :P

Google might spend 5 million on a advertising campaign for a similar service, not to mention the cost to build the software, etc. Then there is the very real possibility, that no one bites. It actually makes cost effective sense to just buy out a company like reCAPTCHA, IMHO.

It's a guaranteed investment. :)
I'm not disputing the relevance of ReCaptcha to Google, I'm merely disputing the value of it. Why $500m? Why not $50m? Or $5m?

Re: Small tool

Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 2:12 pm
by alex.barylski
I'm not disputing the relevance of ReCaptcha to Google, I'm merely disputing the value of it. Why $500m? Why not $50m? Or $5m?
No idea man. I guess if either of us could answer that quesiton, we'd probably be wealthly businessmen as well? :P