After BT pays up for Ribbit, so Comcast TV firm buys DailyCandy

It’s so simple. Every day, Daily Candy sends out an email featuring one cool thing that a sassy Sex-in-The-City kinda gal might fancy. Looks like they tailor it to a dozen cities. But, they reckon to be making £5m profit this year.

Lovely editorial perspective. Greatly scalable.

Well, a US cable TV firm just bid $125million to buy the thing.

Techcrunch carries the story here.

Hmmm. That’s £5m or $10m per city of coverage. Sweet exit indeed.

London digital magic continues

The challenge in searching for the Next Big Thing is that so many entrepreneurs are hard at it in Widget World – creating the business of the future. How do you grade them, rate their prospects and see clear water between them?

That task has recently fallen to Chinwag, the digital commentators, who are leading a UK government trade mission – Digital Mission – to take Brit firms to big US events for a spot of exposure. No doubt, with some limelight, passes to Web 2.0 Expo and some air tickets involved, Chinwag had a big field to whittle down.

Those going to the Big Apple with Digital Mission in Sept – and therefore worth a sniff as candidates for Next Big Thing… (Digital Mission has 40 places for Austin, Texas in Mar 09 next up…)
B View – http://www.bview.co.uk 
Harvest Digital – http://www.harvestdigital.com 
Head London – http://www.headlondon.com
Headshift – http://www.headshift.com 
Huddle – http://www.huddle.net 
idiomag – http://www.idiomag.com 
KMP Interactive Marketing and Technology – http://www.kmp.co.uk 
Market Sentinel – http://www.marketsentinel.com 
Mippin – http://www.mippin.com
Littleloud – http://www.littleloud.com 
QuickTV – http://www.quick.tv 
Slicethepie – http://www.slicethepie.com 
Smarkets – http://smarkets.com/ 
Sweemo – http://www.sweemo.com/ 
Tactile CRM – http://www.tactilecrm.com/ 
Tempero – http://www.tempero.co.uk 
UGame – http://www.ugame.net 
UnLtdWorld – http://www.unltdworld.com
Unruly Media – http://www.unrulymedia.com 
Veedow – http://www.veedow.com 
WorldTV – http://worldtv.com

More details on the companies, and their delegates, can be found on the NYC 08 Companies page.
http://www.chinwag.com/digitalmission/nyc08-companies

To quote Chinwag’s website on the selection process: ‘The talent on display was very impressive and we were literally awed by the calibre of business and innovation in the mix! The broad swathe of companies is also testimony to the bouyancy, creativity and profound depth of the UK digital scene.’

Go for it, guys… show ’em what London has to offer!

BT acquires Ribbit platform to take on Skype?

I’ve watched everyone blog about Cuil this week – taking on Google from Ireland. Flash in the pan?

Bigger UK news of a BT $100m acquisition seems to have gone under the UK blog radar. The blog ReadWriteWeb has 229,000 RSS readers and covered the fascinating story of Ribbit, an open source app allowing users to put a ‘call me’ button on their website and get an instant call centre hook-up. Not a call to a phone, but to your computer skype-like. Cool or what?! (well, that’s how I’m understanding it at first glance… over ReadWriteWeb’s post on the deal.)

TechCrunch blogged it here… they claim that Ribbit has given a ten-fold return to the investors who put in £13m some two and a half years ago. Nice work for VCs Allegis Capital, KPG Ventures and Alsop Louie Ventures!

The interesting case study to explain Ribbit is that you could, for instance, put together a page with a list of hotels for your holiday plans, or your wedding… and instead of clicking thru hypertext to the website, you could click straight thru to make a call to reservations. Neat.

All part of that trend I referenced earlier (Greycroft VC etc) of big tech-media-telecom firms trying to buy the right widgets to leapfrog into the future.