Update: Om Malik updates that the tentative confirmation of the deal is at $40M
This is (or should I say was) expected. Google showing its interests in Riya, for the tunes of $40-60M. There is a lot of talk on the blogosphere (Om, Niall, Paul) today about Google aquiring Riya. None has been confirmed by either of the sides to the moment.
Opportunities: Google already has a nice user base in the picture management domain by virute of Picasa. Riya would be a nice add-on on top of Picasa’s current capabilities. Picasa’s Timeline functionality can nicely use Riya’s search technology to provide a new and improved Timeline for a particular tag from your picture collection.
Riya has been gathering a huge fan base since Munjal started posting up-to-date status on his blog. The team has been doing long hours to get out the alpha, though I didnt hear much about the first wave of alpha invites. Was there ever a second wave of alpha invites? Not sure. It seemed that the first alpha testers gave a lot of feedback to stall the second group of invites (just my guess though).
Google on the other hand might look at this as another aquisition opportunity in its current aquisition mode. Given the feedback its getting for Picasa, this could be a wise investment. Also looking at the way Google is providing server-space and bandwidth in terms of GMail and Google Base, this would be a no brainer for Google to integrate Riya’s services within its existing services.
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[...] Riya. Team at Riya are playing with a nice technology. They are getting nice press ( best in all 3 discussed here). Are they creating more users (who will return)? Not sure. I didnt want to say that, but this just came to my mind. Right now the numbers are around 25 Alpha-I testers. Another 1000 for Alpha-II by early tommorow, and another ~6300 for a later release based on how the Alpha-II goes. These are big numbers, but are they sustainable numbers? I dont see anything wrong in the technology. Its the release cycle that I am worried of. Riya had been there for some time now. Most of the people get turned off when they hear so much about the product around the ethernet, but still see no way to try the product. What Morfik guys did at this point, was that they released a video of the product being driven to create a demo application. I havent seen much at Riya.com outside the static screen shots posted in the tour. Once the users stick around for a 7-10 days to get his/her hands wet, and dont hear much about it, I am not sure when and will they come back again. I can be easily wrong here (after the Google-Riya rumour though). I am sure guys at Riya are doing the best and being careful about how much they open up the pipeline, given the resource hungry application we are dealing with. [...]