Amazon.com Inc has agreed to acquire PlanetAll, a web-based personal information manager, and Junglee Corp, a maker of virtual databases (VDBs), in deals together worth $280m. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based PlanetAll was founded in late 1996 to centralize contact and calendar details and help people stay in touch. It now has 1.5 million members, who can synchronize their details with data from Microsoft’s Outlook and 3Com’s PalmPilot. In a statement, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos called PlanetAll the most innovative use of the internet I’ve seen. PlanetAll will continue trading as a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. By contrast, the staff at Sunnyvale, California-based Junglee are packing for the move to Seattle. Junglee carries 15 million items in its shopping guide and has around 90,000 job listings under its Job Canopy. Incidentally, Amazon’s purchase of Junglee leaves C2B Technologies the last independent player in the shopping search engine market, according to C2B CEO Scott Walchek. Where Junglee was building its own brand, C2B says it strives to be an OEM provider of technology along the lines of search engine Inktomi. So where do Junglee and PlanetAll fit into the ever-widening Amazon family? The bookseller claims its sole purpose in life is to enrich the online shopping experience for customers. In the case of Junglee, that enrichment comes in the form of the incredible people and incredible technology now heading north, according to Amazon spokesperson Bill Curry. Junglee clearly meshes with Amazon’s existing web retailing strategy, but analysts and others have seen the PlanetAll acquisition as a possible step towards a portal business model. Not so, Curry says. We are not a portal. That’s a great business but it’s somebody else’s business, he explains. Ideally, nothing should distract potential buyers from their perfect concentration on the purchasing process. As Curry concludes: If a portal is a door, we are a living room. Amazon will issue 800,000 shares to acquire PlanetAll and 1.6 million for Junglee. The acquisitions are expected to be wrapped up during this quarter.
