TECH CRUNCH - Feb 22 - Sugar Inc., a media company that caters exclusively to women, is acquiring Circle of Moms, a social network for moms and moms-to-be. Financial terms were not disclosed. Circle Of Moms has a community of ~6M moms connected around news and advice on parenting/mom topics. Sugar, which just raised $15M in new funding last year, will operate Circle of Moms as an independent subsidiary.
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LinkedIn Picks Up Rapportive For Around $15 Million
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 8 - LinkedIn has bought contact management startup Rapportive. The startup, which aggregates and displays the social networking accounts of the people you contact through Gmail, was backed for $1M by seed investors Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500 Startups, Michael Zirngibl, Ashish Soni and David Cancel.
Google’s 79 Acquisitions In 2011 Cost Nearly $2 Billion
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 27 – Yesterday, Google its 10-K with the SEC and revealed that in 2011, the company spent $2 billion in cash and stocks on completing 79 acquisitions during the year. Several of the larger purchases included ITA Software for $676M in cash, Clever Sense, Katango, and Apture. In the filing, the company states “Acquisitions will also remain an important component of our strategy and use of capital, and we expect our current pace of acquisitions to continue”, so it is not expected for Google to slow down in 2012. In addition, their full-time employee count grew 33% from 24,400 to 32,467.
Twitter Acquires Malware Protection Company
MASHABLE - Jan 24 - Twitter company announced its acquisition of spam and malware protection service Dasient. Dasient will be integrated into Twitter’s “revenue engineering team because they have a deep understanding of advertising-platform security issues,” says Rachael Horwitz, a spokesperson for Twitter. The team will be very valuable as Twitter continues to expand its ad products.
Twitter Acquires News Aggregate Summify
MASHABLE – Jan 19 – Startup social aggregation service Summify announced Thursday that it has been acquired by Twitter, though it remains unclear how the social networking site will integrate Summify’s business strategy into its own. Launched by two Romanian entrepreneurs, Summify collects and delivers the top five news stories being shared by friends on your social networks and delivers them in a daily summary. Terms of the deal have remained confidential, but Summify has already stopped new account registrations and will remove some of its key features in the coming weeks as it prepares for the merger.
Zynga Acquires Four Mobile Gaming Companies
CNET NEWS – Jan 18 – San Francisco-based game maker Zynga announced today that in the last five months, it has purchased four mobile gaming companies, increasing its presence across multiple devices. Among the companies acquired by Zynga are German-based Gamedoctors (ZombieSmash), San Francisco-based Page44 Studios (World of Goo), San Francisco-based HipLogic, and New York-based Astro Ape Studios. Zynga declined to say how much it paid for the companies.
by Dara Kerr
See full article at CNet News
Tagged Acquires hi5
TECH CRUNCH - Dec 14 - Social network Tagged has acquired the social game network hi5, doubling Tagged’s monthly active users to 20M. The combination will also increase the total number of registered users to 330M, up from 100M. The deal’s terms were not disclosed, but include the hi5 website and user base.
Facebook Has Acquired Gowalla
TECH CRUNCH - Dec 2 - Facebook has acquired location-based startup Gowalla. The terms of the deal haven’t been reported, and Gowalla declined to comment. Facebook says it doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation. According to CNN’s report, the Gowalla team will be working on Facebook Timeline, with most of the team moving to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters and some remaining in Gowalla’s hometown of Austin, where Facebook has an office as well. Gowalla, which has raised $10.4M to date, first launched at SXSW 2009 — going head-to-head against Foursquare, with a stronger emphasis on virtual goods than their competitor.
Facebook Buys Baltimore Company That Sued It
BALTIMORE SUN - Nov 23 - WhoGlue, a small Baltimore company that sued Facebook two years ago, was reportedly acquired by Facebook earlier this month for an undisclosed amount. The lawsuit that he had filed against Facebook -- for infringing on a patent titled "distributed personal relationship information management system and methods" -- was settled last year in a "very positive" way, WhoGlue founder said, and he and Facebook execs kept in touch.
MyHeritage Has Acquired FamilyLink
TECH CRUNCH - Nov 22 - Israeli company MyHeritage, which operates a huge family-based social network has acquired FamilyLink, the developer behind family history content sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com. While financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, this is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. Past acquisitions include Germany’s OSN, Poland’s Bliscy.pl, Dutch Family Network ZOOOF and most recently BackupMyTree.
Tencent in Talks to Buy Stake in Chinese SN Happy Networks
WSJ - Oct 26 - Tencent is in talks to buy a stake in Chinese social network Happy Networks, owner of Facebook-like social network Kaixin001. Terms are still being finalized, but would involve Tencent initially spending ~$40M to buy an undisclosed minority stake in Happy Networks, which also has investment from Tencent's rival, Sina Corp.
by Nisha Gopalan and Loretta Chao
See full article at WSJ
Hulu Is No Longer for Sale
MASHABLE - Oct 14 - Hulu started considering a sale in June after Yahoo expressed interest in acquiring the world’s second largest video website. Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Dish Network and others were reportedly in the running. However, none of the bidders offered an amount that was satisfactory to its owners. Google apparently offered ~$4 billon, but wanted longer-term guarantees to its video content.
LinkedIn Buys Real-Time Search Startup
MASHABLE - Oct 12 - LinkedIn has acquired IndexTank, a provider of real-time hosted search technology, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help improve LinkedIn’s internal search technology.
Yahoo Out as Hulu Mulls Other Bids
CNET NEWS - Oct 10 - Currently, Hulu's board of directors is mulling bids from Dish Network, Amazon, and Google. However, Yahoo, which first met with Hulu to discuss a possible acquisition, has backed out of trying to acquire the firm as it prepares to potentially sell off its own company. Dish Network is now the new front-runner to acquire the streaming-video service. The company initially offered $1.9 billion for Hulu but has asked Hulu to change its bid. Google, on the other hand, is willing to pay more than $2 billion, but has required Hulu to agree to certain conditions before it can complete the deal.
EU Approves Microsoft’s $8.5 Billion Acquisition of Skype
TECH CRUNCH - Oct 7 - The European Commission has cleared Microsoft’s $8.5 billion proposed acquisition of Skype. With this approval, the acquisition can now take place.
LinkedIn Acquires Social CRM Company Connected
Rhapsody Acquires Napster Subscribers, Assets
Google in Talks to Acquire Katango
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 29 - Google is in talks to acquire Katango, the Kleiner-backed startup that uses algorithms to automatically sort your friends into different groups, with very little effort required on the user’s part. Katango would be a very obvious fit for Google Because Google+ revolves around grouping your friends into different Circles.
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