Snocap Drops 60% Of Staff And On The Market: Looking Good For The Deadpool

B2B digital music distributor company Snocap, the spawn of Napster founder Shawn Fanning, looks like its warming up for a Deadpool entry with confirmation by CNet that the company has let go of 60% of its staff and is on the market.

Snocap has apparently “received interest from several companies” as is pursing these for an asset sale.

Snocap was founded in 2002 and has amongst its investors Ron Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC. The company allows rights owners to place music onto p2p networks and retail sites with DRM, aiming to leverage P2P networks for distribution whilst still charging for music.

Snocap’s last big deal was to provide music sales for MySpace in September 2006 and we wrote about Shawn Fanning’s plans in December 2006 to start a World of Warcraft focused social network called Rapture. According to Snocap’s website the MySpace deal is still in place, which presuming it is transferable to a new owner would provide some value in the Snocap fire sale.

Snocap is now on TechCrunch Deadpool watch.

GrandCentral’s “One Number For Life” Not Really

So much for GrandCentral’s “one number for life” promise. The company is turning off customer phone numbers and giving them new ones following their acquisition by Google last month.

Troy Schneider received such a notice, advising him that in 8 days his GrandCentral number would be canceled and that he would be required to immediately start using a new number allocated to him. Judi Sohn received the same message: with no prior warning she had 8 days left on her existing phone number then it would cease to operate. Sohn was fortunate to some extent: Google has offered to pay for the reprinting of her business cards, but that would appear to be a one off, and a token gesture at that.

The inconvenience of losing a telephone number, particularly for a business, is more than just stationery. Paper telephone listings must be changed (some people still use them), sign writing must be fixed, and every single listing of the old number has to be found and changed. Most land line telephone providers would offer a redirection service for the old number, however with Google it’s simply a matter of 8 days then no more phone number. Every customer that tries calling the old number post cancellation and cannot connect to the business is potentially a lost sale.

There was no comment at the time of writing from Google or GrandCentral. Ironically the last post on the GrandCentral blog talks about the wonders of being able to keep a GrandCentral Number for life.

Update: Founder Craig Walker comments below and notes that this affected on 434 users:

Everybody, thanks for your comments and I want to quickly reply to try to clear the air regarding this issue. I’ll post a full blog about this on the GrandCentral site in just a bit, but first I want to assure everybody that we are NOT disconnecting anyone’s service. Unfortunately we received word recently that one of our partners was stopping their service in part of the country and since that time we’ve been working to port those phone numbers to other partners. We’ve done this successfully for the vast majority of those users but unfortunately there were approximately 400 users whose numbers could not be ported (434 to be exact). As soon as we found out these users could not be ported to other partners, we contacted those users, set up an alternative GrandCentral number in the same area code for them, and gave them a reply email to request additional GrandCentral number choices. Vincent (our COO and Co-Founder) and I have been personally replying to these emails to help make this transition easier. This would have been these case whether or not we were acquired. We completely sympathize with any pain or disruption this might cause these users and will continue to work directly with them to help find a solution. I will post more on our blog shortly, but wanted to give you all a quick heads up.

West Nile Virus fears spur action in San Jose, Los Gatos

By Patrick May After finding more mosquitoes infected with West Nile virus, South Bay authorities are planning to do another fogging in the Los Gatos/San Jose area Monday evening.
Los Angeles steps up efforts to contain spread of West Nile virus People's Daily Online
Case of West Nile Virus in Scott County WTOK
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Cherry Hill Courier Post - CBS 2 - Salem-News.Com
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MediaWhiz Latest Ad Network For Sale?

, a holding company for a number of advertising networks, may be shopping itself to private equity firms. We are hearing that they are looking for $400- $450 million, which is 2.5 - 3 times estimated 2007 revenues.

MediaWhiz owns a number of ad networks, including two that are long time sponsors of this site (Text Link Ads and Auction Ads). Both were recently acquired by MediaWhiz.

I have an email in to the company for comment.

Ad networks are the hot commodity this year, with AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all making big acquisitions. The size of those deals combined is nearly $10 billion.

Acquisition for Clipmarks

New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.

The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it. It is then shared with the community and popular new bookmarks are “popped” to the top of the site. In some ways it is more competitive with Digg than Del.icio.us since popular stories are linked from the home page. See our post on Digg-like competitors from earlier this year where we talked about Clipmarks and others.

I never took much of a liking to Clipmarks - it wasn’t as interesting as Digg and was lost in the sea of social bookmarking competitors. But I congratulate them on the acquisition and look forward to seeing what Forbes does with it. I wonder if Condé Nast’s acquisition of Reddit last year prompted Forbes to take a look at some of the available competitors out there.