YouTube’s founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are making plans again. Last week’s purchase of pioneering social bookmark tool Delicious has been followed by a social intelligence tool, Tap11.com. It’s all through their holding company Avos, but given the track record, there’s a lot we should be expecting from Chen and Hurley. Tap11 looks set to give heavyweight competition to Radian6 and Sysomos – and after Yahoo’s fumbling, Delicious will be hungry to prove what it can do. More on the hot dotcoms…
Just how much Hurley and Chen bought either Tap11 and Delicious hasn’t been disclosed, but both become properties of AVOS, the pair’s San Mateo start-up that is building an “information discovery service on the Web.”
Tap11 builds Web-based, real-time analytics software that more than 500 businesses use to track what is being tweeted, written and said about them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Our vision is to create the world’s best platform for users to save, share and discover new content,” Hurley said in a statement. “With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyze their links’ impact in real time.”
Adam Zbar, Tap11’s CEO said in a statement that he looks forward to working with Hurley and Chen to take the San Francisco-based analytics firm to the next level.
“With over 1 billion users on the social Web and no good tools to systematically archive and analyze this data, there is a massive loss of marketing intelligence,” Zbar said.
AVOS is planning to combine Tap11’s applications with Delicious.com to “provide consumers and publishers with deep, relevant insights and recommendations,” said Braxton Woodham, Tap11’s chief technology officer.
Zbar will become the head of business operations and strategy at AVOS, while Woodham will take a role as the head of engineering.
Hurley and Chen founded YouTube with Jawed Karim in 2005, the three men each former employees of PayPal. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.76bn.
