I remember when Hearst and Scripps fought for my business during my corporate America days. Now they are fighting with Internet acquisitions. Hearst acquired Kaboodle this morning, now Scripps has announced their acquisition of Incando who is known for its personal media sharing service Pickle.com and the user-generated content management platform Powered by Pickle. Scripps acquired Recipezaar last month.
A clip from the official release:
"We are committed to our strategy of owning the food, shelter and lifestyle categories online as well as on air,” said John Lansing, president of Scripps Networks. "With the acquisition of Incando, we now have the back-end tools to engage consumers, viewers, and marketers in a multi-branded, multimedia online universe with compelling, personalized experiences.”
If you are curious as to where Scripps is heading, here is some clues from their release.
Within the next few years, Scripps Networks expects as much as 50 percent of its online content to be co-created by its users.
I love this statement from the release - love the "Web 2.0 Technology" usage!
Based on proprietary software, Incando's Web2.0 technology enables speedy uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site and will enhance the user-centric, social media and personalization functionality around Scripps Networks' lifestyle content.
Om Malik has a great summary of big media's recent tech purchases.