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  • Top European Blogging Platform OverBlog Acquires Timeline Creator Timekiwi

    Sarah Perez

    Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. → Learn More

    Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
    timekiwi

    Normally, Palo Alto companies buy European ones, but sometimes there are exceptions. Case in point: today OverBlog, a leading blog platform in Europe with over 32 million uniques according to comScore, is announcing it has acquired Timekiwi, a tool that helps you make a timeline using your social media postings.

    Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but OverBlog says Timekiwi will be integrated into its platform by summer 2012.

    For those unfamiliar, Timekiwi allows users to create attractive timelines (no relation to Facebook’s new Timeline feature) using posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr and, of course, OverBlog.

    The Palo Alto-based startup was founded in 2010 and launched in the fall. But it has flown under the radar, picking up just 5,000 registered users to date. Says OverBlog founder Frederic Montagnon (also the Director of Strategy at ebuzzing, the company that owns OverBlog), the acquisition was more for the technology in Timekiwi than it was for Timekiwi’s audience. Nor was it an acqui-hire, as the Timekiwi founders, Miha Rebernik and Robert Farazin, will not be joining the OverBlog team.

    Ebuzzing, which raised $25 million in August 2011 following a rebranding from its former name, Wikio Group, saw revenue of $15 million in 2010. In 2011, that figure almost doubled, says Montagnon, and the company expects it to double again in 2012.

    OverBlog had already been working on a similar concept for its blogging platform, so when it saw the Timekiwi technology, it decided to acquire the tech instead of continuing to build from scratch. Timekiwi will be a feature in the new OverBlog release which is planned for this summer.


    Company: Ebuzzing
    Website: ebuzzing.com
    Launch Date: 2007
    Funding: $35.3M

    Ebuzzing, is Europe’s leading Video Advertising Distribution Platform named as one of the 50 fastest growing digital media companies in Europe, by the Media Momentum Awards. Ebuzzing was founded by Bertrand Quesada in 2007 and since then has distributed several thousands of campaigns for many of the world’s leading brands, delivering an innovative mix of influence, reach and engagement across a variety of formats. In 2009, Ebuzzing merged with Wikio Group, a technology company founded by Pierre Chappaz. The combined...

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    Company: Overblog
    Website: over-blog.com
    Launch Date: February 14, 2004

    OverBlog is a blogging platform, created in 2004 by Frédéric Montagnon, Gilles Moncaubeig and Julien Romanetto. Since then, it has become the first European platform with more than 3 millions blogs. OverBlog belongs to the Ebuzzing group since 2012. In 2012, OverBlog has launched a brand new version of its platform, with a highly innovative social aspect: it allows bloggers to agregate all their posts from social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare) to their social hub, on their...

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