We are proud to announce you that you can be proud of your favorite high tech blog.

The rumour was spreading fast and it is now official: Tech IT Easy’s just been acquired by California-based web startup news media TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount (7 figures is all I can say)!

The trigger was double-legged: First, Om Malik announced last week that the next TV show would occur only in Summer 2008, which leaves TechCrunch enough time to bite into GigaOm’s readership by upgrading its content; second, ValleyWag is (undeservely?) taking over TechCrunch, in a rather scary way…It was time for TechCrunch to look for a prey and counter-attack. This is where Tech IT Easy joins the game. A few minutes after the deal was signed, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, said (will be quoted tomorrow in San Diego Mercury News): “From a quality stand point, TechCrunch has always been severely outperformed by Tech IT Easy. We needed to either kill them or eat them. Lucky them, we eventually went for a French kiss rather than a French trafalgar. TechCrunch + Tech IT Easy is a very unique combination in the tech media industry, a winning combination“.

Want the full story? This is how it all happened.

Following a post by my humble self on TechCrunch France on Thursday last week (the original here in French; Google English translation here), where I was invited by Ouriel Ohayon from TechCrunch France, I got a call from Michael Arrington this last Friday saying he would be in Paris the next day to “discuss synergies”, which, in Silicon Valley-maverick code, means “gonna acquire you, bitch”. Upon this call, the Tech IT Easy scrambled (you bet!): Kari, our lead negotiator, came right away from Helsinki, Vincent drove down from Rotterdam to Paris, & Matthias from Munich. Alex, back in his London bank, couldn’t make it because of FT acquisition of CreditCrunch.com. Same for Raphael in Singapore, who insisted on taking part of meetings through our conference call system. Raj, Fidji & Remi held a first meeting on Friday afternoon with Michael: Michael asked tough questions regarding our editorial policy & guidelines, the underlying technology and whether is you it was interoperable or not (thank you Wordpress, it is), went through the résumés of us all, checked references and sources on a number of articles, etc. Price became an issue when Fidji revealed none but Leonard & Emmanuel were full time on the job. It was almost a deal breaker, and Michael said “2 people to run a blog that posts 2 posts per week is like having 1 post office in the entire New York State: a rather dumb thing to do“. Fortunately, when Michael realized our monetization potential (no job board, no Google ads, etc.) could find itself in the hands of ValleyWag, he decided on going further in the negotiation.

The next day in Paris, things went very smoothly. Ouriel had arrived early in the morning from Tel Aviv to check our red tape in the data room – severely guarded by Lucien & Cecil – and save time. Georgia, Steve and Kari handled the negotiations with Michael, who came right away with the right price & the right approach. We wish there were more people like him (to those who call him a diva: he is NOT! a tough-minded but yet human and tech-passionnate entrepreneur who respects entrepreneurs).

We are delighted to have seen this happen. Starting from tomorrow, the team will integrate TechCrunch directly and this site redirected to TechCrunch.

Thanks to all the parties that allowed for the deal to happen; especially to our lawyers who arranged all the contracts, the Deli’s downstairs for being Mike’s official provider with ham & pickle sandwiches all along, and to our readership. Without you, no such thing could’ve happened. It’s been a delight and an honour to have you as readers. Please now follow us on TechCrunch.com. We are all committed to one post per day. Stay tuned!

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Unlike other Mondays’ reputation, March 17th was a bright one in London.

…Post-reporting from the “Creative Business in the Digital Era” seminar, in 01zero-one centre in Soho.

The idea in the CBDE was to bring together people from different walks of the creative industry (music, cinema, publishing, photography…) whose common point is the zeros and the ones: digital works and concepts.

…so as to exchange on intellectual property, open rights, business models, digital marketing, creativity, its stimulation, its canalisation…

If it wasn’t for Suw Charman-Anderson and Michael Holloway from the Open Rights Group (a growing NGO community focusing on Digital Rights Issues) I would have probably stayed home and the other guys may have crossed each other on the pub. So thank you guys for setting up and animating the whole day!

The project has a wiki, at our disposal beforehand – a great thing, given the variety of the people attending.

On Monday we warmed up with a notion-shower by Suw, then got in the shoes of Radiohead and their In RainBows experiment and finally had some real entrepreneurs of the digital era sharing their vision:

A great Tom speaker and Reynolds author of “Blood, Sweat and Tea” distributed under a Creative Commons Licence.

John Buckman, multi-entrepreneur, mostly known as Magnatune CEO and as Bookmooch owner.

And finally, David Bausola and Rob Myers, the principal conceptual stormers behind the project “Where are the Joneses?”.

What are the Joneses? Based on a series-like format, it is mostly a transmedia chameleon; the product is shaped by its environment and its audience, the significance changes depending the angle you choose to look at it.

Nobody knew in advance where the joneses were, the public decided the how-what-where, sending them around Europe to find their siblings, participating themselves in the scenario, in the acting etc.

Mr and Ms Jones, if you came to France you might have recognised Laurent Godard as your sibling : he’s the father of Flateurville, a “discussional” building of a village to finally come up with a film. How? Through regular interactions with the audience, in a “salle de jeux” every Thursday evening. More to discover “sur place” if you happen to be in Paris.

The whole experience made me more aware of the fact that prediction is a quite autistic procedure in digital business, you’d better keep it away if you want things going on smoothly. Well I suppose that it had always been like this, long before I woke up, but in digital business where cycles are faster and faster, prediction seems really outdated.

So, just for the pleasure of philosophizing a bit, prediction may have been only a temporary solution for the industrial first era of business, serving to bridge the gap of the missing dialogue with the “consumer”.

John Buckman made this quite clear to me when discussing on his Magnatune and Bookmooch activities where he applies a trial-error-adaptation schema.

“listen” and “reply” in a way that makes sense, seem to form the principia of digital business for those who do it. The commercial transaction being replaced by a commercial natural language dialogue? trial and error this question as well…

Shall this be confirmed, does it mean we’re finally moving on from Industry to Internet? spring feels good…

(to be internetically correct, if someone who reads this is on the south hemisphere, enterring fall, please replace the season by the metallic mecanism as far as spring is concerned, it also feels good)

To get back to last Monday,

My personal favourite gadget presented that day is CCMixter, a pool-tool of music creativity on a “molecular” level : you can post and find samples, remixes,  a capellas and build on them since they are licensed under creative commons. Quite solid concept, as it connects the two extremities of the 2.0 value chain: the artist with the user. Plus it teased some of my memory parts referring to other music tools, like C-sound. I wonder what applies in the case of music-code copyrights…

Cheese.

Accuse me of writting cheese, “come on Georgia, stop name dropping and all”

Nope nope, cheesy or not, the sensation of this seminar was like a cute baby incarnating the taste for openness, the playfulness of creativity and the cosiness of legally-correct digital business.

loved it.

Cheers.

Georgia

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