Digg founder Kevin Rose was first hired by Google as a partner at Google Ventures in early 2012, and today we learned Rose is shaking up his involvement at the search company’s investment arm. As Fortune notes, Kevin Rose decided several months back to move from general partner to venture partner at Google Ventures, and today Rose shared that his role will shift to an advisory one. Expand Expanding Close
Daniel Burka, one of the founding members of mobile development lab Milk, announced Monday that he is leaving his current position inside Google+ to join Google Ventures.
Burka occupied the mobile user experience position at Google+. At Google’s venture arm, he’ll join as a design partner.
Google is reportedly close to buying social startup Meebo at roughly $100 million, AllThingsDreported this evening. Citing “two sources familiar with the matter,” the publication said the deal is close to going down.
Meebo launched in 2005 and has had many products over the years like a web-based and smartphone-based IM client and a tool bar that can be loaded on websites to provide readers with social links. These types of toolbars can be found on TMZ, TV Guide, and more. Most recently, the startup launched a new homepage that lets you “create an interest profile to get new and timely information about the things that matter to you.”
Over the years, the Mountain View, Calif.-based (how fitting) startup raised $60 million in funding to date. It most recently raised a monster round of $25 million from Khosla Ventures in 2010.
If the acquisition goes through, Google will most likely use the team and technology to boost its social network/heavy Facebook competitor Google+. More recently, Google bought out Digg-founder Kevin Rose and his team of employees from their endeavor called “Milk.” Rose and his former team are currently assigned to work on Google+, which we expect to be the same fate for the Meebo team.
Rose’s mobile app incubator Milk yesterday announced it was shutting down its only product, Oink.
Google is not outright buying or “acqhiring” Milk, the sources explicitly said, but Rose and some others from the company have been hired. It’s not clear what will happen to Milk after Rose joins Google.
His social and more recent local background would seem to make him a natural at Google+. Rose is also an Angel investor having thrown in with Fab, Zynga, ngmoco, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Interestingly, Google was very close to acquiring Rose’s Digg four years ago, but the deal never went through. Expand Expanding Close
In an attempt to connect with his fans, Digg’s founder Kevin Roseannounced that he will now be forwarding his personal domain to Google+. His personal domain, kevinrose.com, was once used for his somewhat popular blog. In recent months, his blogging has slowed down — making forwarding to Google+ a smart move. Rose tweets:
Decided to forward kevinrose.com to Google+. G+ gives me more (real-time) feedback and engagement than my blog ever did.
Google+ is great for sharing longer posts, where you can get faster feedback from readers. Obviously, you can’t host ads on Google+ to make money off your posts, but we assume Rose isn’t too worried about that. Who said Google+ wasn’t catching on? Expand Expanding Close
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