Written by Jada MacFie

This isn't a story about another Start UP in the great out there that has been successfully bought out by a media giant for millions of dollars. It could, however, still make our eyes glass over and sigh dreamily into our open source SaaS business accounting programmes. This is a story about a Start UP who successfully bought FROM the media giant!

We delightedly learned this morning via a report on peHUB that Automattic (creators of the WordPress blogging platform) have acquired blo.gs from Yahoo! While actual Financial terms have not been yet disclosed, we do know that Automattic has raised around $30millionUSD to date via Polaris Venture Partners, Radar Ventures, True Ventures and the New York Times Co. So they've got a bit of spare change to play with.

Based in San Francisco, Automattic has been referred to in related articles as a "start up" so it is refreshing to hear that not only can a Start UP aspire to run a successful business (WordPress being their open source blogging tool that can be downloaded and customised by the end user), they can then start buying up from those we hope to be bought by.

Jim Winstead, creatof of Blo.gs, sold to Yahoo! in June 2005 and wrote at the time "this is the sort of good home that i was looking for -- Yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure."

That being said, Yahoo! was apparently, "refreshingly quick and focused to work with on this deal,"  according to Automattic CEO Toni Schneider in his blog.

Where to from here fellow Start UPs and bloggers? Infinity and beyond by the sounds. While there is a recession out there and a lot of us are having baked beans again for lunch, rest assured in the fact that somewhere out there someone has some money to spend and if you're feeling lucky (punk) they might like to buy a bit of NZ.

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