It's been a long and winding road since Tariq Krim created and eventually left Netvibes, but today Netvibes has been acquired by huge French engineering giant Dassault Systèmes for an undisclosed amount.

Krim continues to pursue his original dream of organising the social web on Jolicloud.

Netvibes had an early lead back in the era when 'personal start pages' were the new new thing, but (and we won;t go into the long story here) a large pivot towards enterprise saw it moving into more of a dashboard for Fortune 500 brands, enterprises and agencies (including Coca Cola, HP, L`Oreal, US Dept.

of Energy, Digitas, McCann Worldgroup, Edelman, Lufthansa, Sage)Although you'd be forgiven for not tracking its growth in that other world, it's in fact turned into a decent enterprise story, serving over 250,000 Web apps directly into businesses and connecting internal enterprise systems (like Salesforce, SQL, ERP, etc.) with the real-time Web.