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Yahoo buys no-sales FoxyTunes for $40m By Guy Griml Tags: yahoo, toolbar, israel  Yahoo, the Internet giant that Microsoft wants to take over, is gearing up for its second Israeli investment: FoxyTunes, owned by entrepreneurs Vitaly and Alex Sirota. The exact amount has not been announced, but sources close to the situation say the company will go for between $30 million and $40 million. The Sirota brothers, new immigrants from Russia, are the big winners in the deal, along with Yossi Vardi and a group of private investors from the United States. Initial investment in the company is estimated at just a few million, and the brothers will be raking in a total of $15 million. FoxyTunes was founded in 2005 after developing an application that adds a browser toolbar that lets users perform media-player operations such as volume control, jump forward, back or stop. The application enables the use of music files through Explorer or Firefox browsers with a simple interface that connects to nearly any type of known player. Advertisement "The project started out as a sort of personal project of mine," Alex Sirota says. "I started developing a Firefox browser plug-in in 2004, with the idea of developing a toolbar to control media player from the browser." Surfers like the Sirota brothers' program, it won prizes and finally became one of Firefox's most popular add-ons. FoxyTunes also developed a plug-in for Explorer. To date, no less than 8 million users have downloaded the add-on program. "We saw that surfers really like the add-on that we developed; the connection we created between the browser and media player. In our next versions we also supported media players available on the Web, like Pandora and Real Network's Rhapsody Online. Our developments are based on the fact that most surfers spend their time on browsers. As a result, they like a tool that lets them control music with the browser, play certain songs, and jump backward and forward. FoxyTunes has developed another product - Signatunes - that lets surfers add music to various services on their favorite application. A sort of musical signature can be added to services like Web mail (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL), which notes the name of the song being played. The musical signature is not just for Web mail, but blogs like WordPress or LiveJournal, and social networks like Myspace and Facebook. Another FoxyTunes product is FoxyTunes Planet. Alex Sirota describes it as the Netvibes of the musical world: "One site lets you access content on artists from a variety of sources. For instance, on the Madonna page you can get songs from Pandora, video clips, pictures from Flickr or news about her." Yahoo, he says, bought the company because FoxyTunes has become the start page for surfers interested in music. In terms of its business model, the company has no revenues yet, and doesn't include advertisements, but plans to in the future. It plans to emulate the traditional eyeballs model of other Internet companies. "Yahoo bought us because our product provides added value to theirs. After a few conversations with Yahoo we understood that our vision and theirs are very similar," says Alex Sirota. "We will become part of Yahoo Entertainment, and they will distribute the FoxyTunes toolbar to as many people as possible." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Prayer change Pope Benedict XVI nixes a reference to Jews` `blindness` over Jesus in a Catholic prayer. Blind and deaf in Jaffa 'The world's first professional deaf-blind theatre company' takes center stage in Jaffa.

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