drugs or the kind of temptations that used to be listed on Craigslist under “adult services.”) The team went from checking out a startup weekend to getting into the competition, to landing $1 million in investments and rolling out the service at South By Southwest in about a month. It’s a very of-this-moment company founding that will be fun to follow up on in the future.
—Some acquisition news made its way onto our radar screen, with Amazon closing regulatory approval on its purchase of Diapers.com and dot-com survivor Drugstore.com getting scooped up by pharmacy chain Walgreens (NYSE: [[ticker:WAG]]). Amazon expects the diaper deal to close in the next few days, now that the feds are satisfied the acquisition doesn’t mean Amazon now has the baby bottom market covered. The Walgreens and Drugstore.com (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DSCM]]) tie-up is worth about $429 million, a nice premium on the present stock price but, of course, nowhere near the insane days of the pre-bust valuation.
—We saw some other personnel news: Seattle-based business software company Varolii announced that former Microsoft general manager David McCann was its new president and CEO, replacing company veteran Nicholas Tiliacos. And over at supercomputing giant Cray, officials said they were cutting about 50 jobs to make room for hires in different categories.
—Those newshounds over at Amazon rolled out their new appstore for Android devices, even though Apple took umbrage at the branding similarity to its own “App Store” and filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop Amazon’s version. These two companies are going at it pretty heavily these days, which makes me think: Didn’t we always used to talk about Microsoft vs. Apple?
—Finally, in the sage advice department, Seattle entrepreneur and poker organizer Bob Crimmins weighed in with a guest column on his (lucky?) 13 tips for getting the entrepreneurial seedbed prepped with good advisers, networking, and all the other support structures needed to find success in the startup game. A sample tip: “Be totally f#cking honest … about everything.” That can’t be bad advice, just generally.
