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TICKLE INC. CONSOLIDATES SOCIAL NETWORKING MARKET WITH ACQUISITION SAN FRANCISCO (November 13, 2003) Tickle Inc. (www.tickle.com), formerly Emode.com, Inc., today announced the acquisition of Ringo, Inc. (www.ringo.com), the third largest social networking company in the market. The acquisition integrates Ringo's robust feature set and more than 350,000 members with Tickle's newly-launched social networking services. The combined membership of more than one million consumers further solidifies Tickle's ten week-old social networking service as the number two player in the market. In a separate release, the company also announced today the appointment of industry veteran Samir Arora as chairman of the board and its name change to Tickle Inc. "We are thrilled to be joining forces with one of the only other social networking sites that has viral growth and a rare team of people who are both technically excellent and understand the human side of the technology," said James Currier, founder and CEO of Tickle Inc. "Ringo's unparalleled feature set and groundbreaking technology will add more social networking power to our overall business and help us extend the incredible growth we've experienced so far. This move is the first step in a focused expansion strategy for Tickle." Since its founding four years ago, Tickle has provided viral content such as self-discovery, matchmaking and social networking services to build a critical mass of over 16 million members. According to comScore Media Metrix, Tickle recently broke into the Top 50 most trafficked web sites and was shown to be the number two Internet destination in the women's category - currently, more than 65 percent of the company's members are women. Tickle has a solid revenue model with a majority of revenues coming from consumer subscriptions and a smaller portion from top-tier advertisers - resulting in six consecutive quarters of profitable growth. "We were approached by many companies, but ultimately we decided that Tickle had the most compelling vision for how social networking interacts with the rest of the Internet," said Michael Birch, co-founder and president of Ringo. "Tickle remains one of the most viral companies I've seen after many years in this industry, and I was excited to join the team and see where the power of our combined forces would take us." Launched in early 2003, Ringo has built a significant offering that has grown virally and attracted a strong, diverse community of active users. Based in Walnut Creek, Calif., the company and its founders - Michael Birch, Paul Birch and Morgan Sowden - have been developing viral online applications for over four years and were most recently named by Spin magazine as "the next Friendster." The technology behind the service, Ringo's rapid application development environment, was specifically designed to develop and launch community applications quickly and seamlessly. Through the acquisition, Tickle further strengthens its reach into women, religious groups and music fans and will have access to Ringo's industry-leading, robust features set, including popular services such as blogs, events, forums, polls, calendaring and classified listings. The acquisition of Ringo is a cash and stock deal, effective immediately. Key members of the Ringo team will join Tickle's product and engineering groups in San Francisco to accelerate the development of the Tickle social networking service. About Tickle (formerly Emode): |
