The main fuel for the rumor fire was the fact that the site is down but has a message saying "While we're cocooned for metamorphosis..." on the frontpage. Clicking on the word “metamorphosis” brings you to Microsoft Search.
A Washington Post article confirms that SeeqPod is indeed in talks with the software giant, but that no deal has been made. The deal would not be a full acquisition, and Microsoft would rather "negotiate a piecemeal sale of its technology assets and find new jobs for its core technology team."
Microsoft is said to be looking into the assets including "its targeted crawling system for finding playable media on the Web, its search index of 14 million playable search results and 500 million associated text pages, its recommendation and discovery system, five related patents, and the teams associated with each of these technologies."
SeeqPod is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection thanks to a pending lawsuit brought forth by the Big 4 record labels. An anonymous source says SeeqPod will not settle and does not want to "become an ATM machine" for the music industry.
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 11 May 2009 0:33
