Emotionr Sold To Zallas Technologies
Little known Finnish beta service called Emotionr has been sold to Zallas Technologies in the US. The price was not disclosed, but my guess is that we're not talking about astronomical figures here based on the complexity of the free service. Furthermore, the service does not show significant amounts of traffic data in Compete.com statistics so the price for it might be a symbolic one.
Emotionr is a service where one can tell in a simple manner how she is feeling today. The user sets her mood on a slidebar with values from 0 to 10 and clicks it to lock the mood. This mood data is then used in various ways. Emotionr knows for example the mood of certain countries as people give some personal information upon signing up. Zallas Technologies is a 75 person strong US coding firm and with the sale they are completely in charge of the future development of the service. No information was given on the plans though in the press release.
Emotionr was founded by Elmo Saukko and Arto Aaltonen. The fellows are known for other successful web properties as well including Kuvake.net, Mikseri.net (these were sold to Rohea earlier this year) as well as Stardoll. Saukko and Aaltonen won't be resting on their heels for a long time as they are working on a new project called Tripvan. Tripvan is currently in development phase and is only accepting queries for beta invitations.
This was already out in their news letter in June.
I think in todays business transparency is very important and the business deal should have been made public to enable those who maybe negotiating sale of their businesses to more established companies have a clue of what figures are involved.
A friend of mine works at Zallas, Europe and he told me it was around $250,000 USD. He says they have a dedicated team working on this project now, not in Europe though, in one of their other locations - not sure which.
I agree though, they should have made it public - maybe some bigger companies would get interested... they might have gotten a better deal.
They actually did. It was on their website for a few months, from what I remember. My company was bidding on it also; we offered them $160,000 USD plus stock, and they declined. So zallas must have offered more. They own a couple hundred websites of all sorts. I haven't seen many changes though since they acquired it. Taras Vovk, their President, has e-mailed members right after the acquisition and has listed his future plans for the company, but I don't know if I really have seen any drastic improvements yet. Maybe they ran into hidden rocks? Maybe they are just planning it all out. Who knows; one thing is for sure - the more time you invest into your idea, the more you can get paid for it, even if it never makes a dime :) great job, those guys in finland!