Peter Chun

Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.

“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaing brands going forward” he added.

Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.

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Hong Kong based Recruit.net, a job search engine we first wrote about in May, is expanding, and they’re still not interested in the United States.

Recruit.net aggregates job listing from partner sites for its main portal and also provides syndicated results for other sites, a model that sees the Recruit.net bringing in increasing revenues in a hyper-competitive vertical.

Recruit.net launched into Malaysia in September and will launch a New Zealand portal this week. Coming soon are sites for Vietnam and the Philippines in the first quarter of 2008. The company already provides sites for Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.

It’s an interesting corporate strategy, not only from the tech/ revenue viewpoint but from the complete lack of desire to enter the US market (I understand it, but others with a US focus may not). Recruit.net’s Maneck Mohan told me that the company sees a growing internationalization of web services, and that their focus on Asia is timely given the growing economic power of the region at a time when the US economy is in trouble. Countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines still have relatively low internet penetration levels (20% and 16% respectively) but this is changing as more people come online as both see a growing middle class. Even Malaysia, long considered to be one of the more prosperous South East Asian countries has only recently passed 50% internet penetration (52% currently) out of a population of 28 million; Vietnam and the Philippines have populations of 85 million and 87 million people. As Mohan said to me in an email: “why enter a crowded market like the US and compete with existing players, when white hot emerging markets like Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam are wide open and under serviced?”

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Hey all,

Wanted to say that the sites been going through a variety of updates and that I’m coming close to finalizing a few things.  If anyone knows any good custom theme editors in the interim, please post in comments!

Graz!

 
New pics of the upcoming Nike Zoom LeBron Soldier II recently hit the Net. Billed as the King's play-off sneaker, the Soldier line was originally developed as an off-shoot of the popular LeBron 20-5-5. Now coming into its second year, the Soldier has departed from its protective, durable, and strapped roots (all of which were major selling points of the 20.5.5 and Solider 1) to a more streamlined, lightweight, and low profile sneaker. New to the Soldier series, Nike and LeBron have worked together to develop "milkcrate" technology, a technology inspired by LeBron's younger days of playing Ball with a milkcrate hoop that will be first introduced through the Soldier II. The "milkcrate" concept was first introduced through the strap of the currently available Nike Zoom LeBron V.
 
The Nike Zoom LeBron V is set to release during the Summer of 2008.
 
Discuss the Nike Zoom LeBron Soldier II in the KATC Community by clicking the "Add/View Comment" button, or, by clicking [HERE]
 
Images: markyd33psu via [NT]
 
More After the Jump
 
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The National Center For Health Statistics (NCHS) says that there are approximately 2.2 million marriages in the U.S. every year. Some of those marriages work out well. But a big percentage of marriages - up to 1.4 million per year - end in divorce.

There are sites that help people plan for marriage, like the $400+ million market cap TheKnot.com. And when the time comes, BabyCenter, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, will help them through the process of having a baby. There’s even Caring.com, which helps people plan for aging and death.

But if your blissful union ends in a dissolution, there aren’t many places to turn on the Internet for help in getting through the process. And that’s a shame, because the average participant spends up to $15,000 in the months leading up to and after a divorce. Houses are sold or refinanced, new bank and credit card accounts are opened, and someone has to furnish that shabby apartment that dad has been booted to. And it doesn’t stop there, or course. Revenge sex and, eventually, the ridiculous hope that the next relationship will end better than the previous one leads divorcees to start checking out the online dating services, too.

That’s why new Florida-based startup Divorce360 makes so much sense. These people are confused, lonely and need to make major financial decisions fast. Divorce360 will help them, just like TheKnot helps with marriages and BabyCenter helps with having a baby. And like those sites, Divorce360 will find ways make money through advertising, classified listings and lead generation.

Site Overview

The site is broken up into time based categories, from Deciding (to have a divorce) through Moving On (at the end of the process). Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video. The professional content is clearly there to seed the site. The user generated stuff, including user profiles, blogs and questions/answers, help builds community on the site. That community can help provide a crucial support network for the newly divorced.

A directory for service providers is coming. The company says listings will be free to ensure rich content. Later, premium listings will help generate revenue. The site also has other resources for divorcees: checklists, budget calculators, a glossary, links to relevant state laws and resources and an abuse hotline.

Here’s one of the smartest features - the site has an area for users to keep private notes that are not viewable by others - a sort of private journal and incident report. In the early stages of a breakup privacy is often a real problem since the couple cohabitate and any notes or files, even if stored on a computer hard drive, may be seen by the enemy (your wife or husband).

Advertising for now is basically a mixture of display and text ads. But over time, the company says, they’ll be able to generate revenue more intelligently by recommending services, classified ads in the directory and other lead generation.

Divorce360, which has six employees, was founded by Cotter Cuningham, who was previously the COO of publicly held BankRate.com (Cunningham says he’s never been divorced, by the way). The company is headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida. They raised a $2.5 million Series A round of funding in September 2007 from Austin Ventures and a number of angel investors. Austin Ventures’ Tom Ball joined their board of directors.

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Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.

The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.

Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.

The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.

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Two days ago a news of the second coming of the New Balance, Undefeated, Stussy and Real Mad Hectic collaboration was reported which featured a picture with all three shoes. Here’s a chance to get a better look at the 3 pairs. Via Juebankongjian.