AOL Acquires Q&A Yedda, Inc.

Just got an interesting email from the management team at Yedda informing me that they had just been acquired by AOL. This is of particular interest to the ABC Article Directory, due to the fact that we were one of the early adopters of the Yedda Q&A system on our site. As a matter of fact, it is still listed on our home page as a new feature. Looks like we know how to pick winners. You can check out how it works by accessing any article on the ABC Article Directory and scrolling down to the end of the article, just past the resource box.

To quote from the email “Over 100M unique visitors a month are now going to be using the Yedda QnA platform, and power and enrich the QnA database our partners benefit from. Moreover, this huge community will now also be exposed to your website via the attribution of all questions originated from your site. “

The original AOL press release follows:

NEW YORK, NY and Tel Aviv, Israel, November 12, 2007 - AOL announced today that it has acquired Yedda, Inc., a leading semantic social search Questions and Answer service. Yedda will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Founded in 2006, Yedda employs patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question. Yedda’s semantic matching technology intelligently routes questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can ”syndicate” their expertise and spark a community-wide dialogue of people invited to discuss and learn from each other’s experiences.

Using Yedda’s technology, AOL will incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate ”Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming months.

“In the course of our daily lives we often leverage the experience and expertise of friends, colleagues and professionals like doctors and lawyers to get answers to questions we have,” said Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL. “Incorporating Yedda’s unique technology into AOL enables us to bring together our traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to questions.”

“We are excited about joining the AOL family,” said Avichay Nissenbaum, CEO and Co-founder of Yedda. “The services and technologies our team developed are a perfect fit with the AOL strategy. We will continue to empower knowledge communities throughout the Web, directly and through our network of partnerships, and we’re looking forward to weaving our unique value into the various AOL properties.”

Founded by Avichay Nissenbaum and Yaniv Golan, Yedda employs approximately 20 people and will continue to operate in the

U.S. and throughout

Europe. Yedda’s R&D center will continue to be based in

Israel. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About Yedda, Inc.

Yedda (http://www.yedda.com) is a leading free Questions and Answer service. Yedda strives to merge the convenience and efficiency of search with the unlimited value of individual knowledge. Yedda connects knowledge seekers with knowledge sources over the Web, by bringing together relevant individuals with mutual interests on any topic in a dynamic, open, collaborative environment - thus making personal experience and personal knowledge as accessible as documented information is on the Internet.

Yedda helps Publishers and Content web sites to enhance user engagement and overall user loyalty, improve monetization, and increase search engine visibility through promoting their sites as knowledge communities. The Yedda partner program offers a risk free and simple integration through highly customizable and seamless technology.

About AOL

AOL® is a global Web services company that operates some of the most popular Web destinations, offers a comprehensive suite of free software and services, runs one of the largest Internet access businesses in the U.S., and provides a full set of advertising solutions. A majority-owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., AOL LLC and its subsidiaries have operations in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia. Learn more at AOL.com.

You can join this up and coming, exciting site by going to: