ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Fresh off of last week's purchase of contextual-ad serving Israel company, Quigo, AOL has set the blogosphere and news aggregators abuzz again with its latest purchase of Yahoo! Answers rival Q&A website, Yedda.

According to a blog entry on Kwigg, Israel-based Yedda raised $2,5 million in funding earlier this year, and, since June has seen the amount of unique visitors to the site grow from 200,000 to 800,000 in October, with no signs of it slowing down. The entry attributes Yedda's sucess to its partnership with over 50 other websites, ranging from ePals to the theJobNetwork, which are responsible for driving over 90% of the site's total traffic (and isn't included in the above unique visitor number).

Of course, considering recent talk in the blogosphere about too many Israeli companies exiting too early and not fully developing into true players in the international tech industry, my thoughts are, based on the above numbers, perhaps Yedda should have waited longer. As more details about the acquisition unfold it will be interesting to find out why Yedda found this to be the right time as well as what or who has sparked AOL's sudden interest in Israeli startups.