Tucows Buys Kiko on eBay

The Ycombinator funded Kiko, which put itself up for sale on eBay was purchased by Tucows. Tucows is known by some as a shareware site, but the little secret about the Canadian Tucows is it makes a ton of money as a domain registrar.

Apparently, Tucows is working on an email platform of its own and decided the $250K was worth the buy vs. build price. I like the acquisition, but why not chip in a little extra and get the employees of Kiko as well. I like this play with the exception of purely buying the technology and leaving the people behind. My bet is that they will have to rewrite a bunch of the guts of the Kiko Calendar and the entire time they will be wishing they could get a hold of the person that actually wrote the code.

Kiko might have given up to soon, but at least this way some money is returned.