It was one of the initial vital deals of the late 1990s tech boom, but AOLs partnership of present messaging colonize ICQ has eventually been unwound after it sole the Israeli association to Russian financier DST for $187.5 million.
Developed in 1996 by Yair Goldfinger and dual high-school friends, with a $10,000 accede to from a understanding parent, ICQ shortly became the initial mass-market present messaging programming and built a bottom of 100 million users inside of five years.
Prior to the catastrophic partnership with Time Warner, AOL saw the intensity of online discuss early on and acquired the association at the back of the fast flourishing I Seek You record notwithstanding the actuality that the Israeli start-up had not warranted a penny of revenue.
AOL paid $407 million for ICQ in 1998 in what was afterwards the largest-ever partnership of an Israeli company. However, twelve years on, AOL has motionless to sell off the present messaging multiplication to Digital Sky Technologies, that is construction a portfolio of online assets. It paid $200 million for a near-2 per cent interest in Facebook last year and has additionally corroborated Zynga, the amicable networking games developer at the back of FarmVille, to the balance of $180 million.
ICQ has not stood toe-to-toe with opposition products offering by Yahoo! and Microsoft over the past decade but still has 32 million singular users each month and is renouned in Russia, Germany, a little Eastern European countries and Israel. Roughly 80 per cent of the users are elderly in between thirteen and 29.
The cost DST has paid is short of the $200 million to $300 million range primarily reported. Other Russian and Chinese companies were thought to be meddlesome in appropriation the online discuss service.
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