Trunk.ly acquired by Delicious.com owner

Australian social bookmarking start-up Trunk.ly has been acquired by US-based tech company AVOS Systems, the parent company of Trunk.ly competitor Delicious.com, less than a year after it was founded.

Trunk.ly was founded in December 2010 by Tim Bull and Alex Dong. It offers its users the ability to bookmark social media activities such as “Like” on Facebook and Twitter tweets.

With a focus on making the bookmarking process more automated, and supported by intuitive search, Trunk.ly collects every link that users share or “Like” and stores them in one place.

The business was self-funded, with Bull saying it cost less than $5,000 to start-up. The start-up was sold to AVOS for an undisclosed sum.

AVOS, led by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, says Trunk.ly’s technology and insights “will accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious”.

“It became clear that from the first discussion with Trunk.ly’s founders that our visions for the future of bookmarking and discovery were closely aligned,” Hurley said in a company blog post.

As a result of the acquisition, the Trunk.ly service will be discontinued, with the site no longer accepting sign-ups. A full shutdown will occur in the next two months.

Bull says Trunk.ly is excited to begin working with Delicious, and is hopeful Trunk.ly users will migrate their links to the Delicious service.

“We never expected that 12 months ago we would grow Trunk.ly to the success it’s become,” Bull said in a blog post.

“There is a great team [at Delicious] and together we hope to build the best way to discover and collect the web.”

But it seems Delicious.com has been on Trunk.ly’s agenda from the very beginning, with Bull attributing Trunk.ly’s launch date to the rumoured downfall of Delicious back in January.

At the start of the year, Bull told StartupSmart Trunk.ly was catapulted into the marketplace following rumours of Delicious.com’s demise.

“We had in our mind this lovely little timeline that sometime about now [late January] we would throw open the doors of Trunk.ly,” Bull says.

“All of a sudden, Yahoo made this announcement [about the demise of Delicious] and we just went, there are all these people out there who are Delicious users, panicking and looking for Delicious alternatives [so] we just have to throw the doors open.”

It’s unknown whether the Trunk.ly team will relocate to the United States.