What company does Scoble wants to acquire

Web 2.0 conference is starting this Wednesday and I decided to stay offline this weekend to prepare myself for the overload of announcements that are coming, that's why I missed Scoble's kick-off which was brilliant. He managed to keep us busy thinking why he posted the request in his blog, getting the blogosphere to suggest interesting startups to acquire and get more reasons to convince Microsoft execs that the acquisition is important showing blog power.

He states that the company he wants to acquire is working in areas where Vista is not strong, will make an announcement in Web 2.0 conference and it is not cheaper than Flickr and he already said it's not the breaking online news digest Memeorandum, neither the simple web-based tools developers 37signals, nor the innovative unplugged web applications newcomer Morfik, so let's review the other ones suggested:

• Darwin Productions. Suggested in Scoble's Mudpit, but they don't look like a company that will help Microsoft to get a significant entry into Web 2.0 market.


• Flock The social web browser will launch this week but their Firefox and open source roots are important obstacles.


• Feedburner They have enough subscribers to get a good price and monetize feeds with Google AdSense, definitely something Microsoft could use, only the Vista reference does not fit.


• Technorati It won't be cheap and Sifry's Linux roots won't make it easier.


• JotSpot The business model will be more appealing to Microsoft and application wikis are important in Web 2.0 although it won't be cheap either.


• Zimbra Interesting collaboration suite but Sharepoint, Microsoft Mail and Kahuna should take care of this.

No winner yet so let's check the Launch Pad Workshops to find the company.

• Socialtext got recently SAP funding


• Rollyo is a personal search engine but Scoble didn't know about them on Friday


• Joyent sells a box with open source software


• Bunchball is building a platform for Flash-based social applications


• RealTravel focuses in sharing travel experiences


• Zvents looks a lot similar to eventful


• Knownow is a company exploring corporate RSS with enterprise syndication solutions for KM


• Orb Networks is a developer of media delivery software


• Wink is using nanotechnology to provide a social search service with tagging


• AllPeers is a company focused on P2P applications


• PubSub is a persistent query matching engine

I have no definitive winner yet, well let's wait if Scoble does it, I put some money on Feedburner and Orb Networks