Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically. Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t… → Read More
LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been… → Read More
After some years of languishing, BillMonk’s service and user base will be taken over by a young Singapore startup, BillPin, which provides a similar bill-splitting service. Just over six months old, BillPin pitches itself as a “Mint for groups” and offers a way for people to track how much money they owe each other. It has plenty of competitors in the bill-splitting space… → Read More
The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple has acquired WiFiSlam, an indoor GPS startup that enables a smartphone to pinpoint its location — along with that of your friends — in realtime up to 2.5 meters in accuracy. → Read More
Yahoo! has acquired Jybe, the company announced today via a post to its corporate blog. Jybe is a startup founded in 2011 by three ex-Yahoo! employees, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was VP of Yahoo! Search Technology when he departed the company. The startup’s mission was to help connect people to the physical world around them, a mission for which it released an iPhone app late last year to… → Read More
Dropbox has acquired Mailbox, the popular email app for iOS devices, in a deal the terms of which weren’t disclosed. The companies reported the deal to the Wall Street Journal on Friday, saying that Mailbox would remain a separate app as the entire team joins Dropbox. → Read More
Well, Google’s M&A strategy is nothing if not diverse in focus. In November, it acquired package delivery startup Bufferbox. Last month, Google it made its first acquisition of the year, buying eCommerce startup Channel Intelligence. Today, Google dug into the Computer Science at The University of Toronto to acquire DNNresearch, a young startup founded by professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of… → Read More
Microsoft just announced that it has acquired MetricsHub, a service that automates cloud performance management and helps its customers manage their cloud services more efficiently. MetricsHub participated in the Microsoft Azure Accelerator, a competitive three-month accelerator program the company hosts in collaboration with TechStars. → Read More
Master Lock has acquired Toronto-based software-as-a-service enterprise security solution provider Field ID in a deal the terms of which weren’t disclosed. We’ve heard the deal involving the five year-old startup was in the tens of millions, however, and that the company’s angel investors were very pleased with the arrangement. The purchase nets Master Lock an entry into the software market… → Read More
Vimeo has acquired GIF-style video making app Echograph, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed, the company announced today. The price paid for the iPhone and iPad app from Clear-Media was not disclosed, but as a result of the deal Vimeo will now be offering the previously paid app (which was $2.99) for free via the App Store. → Read More
German luxury brand Loewe experienced a roller coaster day. A trader commented that “Apple supposedly wants to bid 4 euros a share for Loewe,” which sent Loewe shares up as much as 44.5 percent to 3.93 compared to yesterday’s closing price of 2.72. The German stock exchange closed today with Loewe shares trading at 3.35, representing a one-day increase of 23.16 percent. → Read More
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in today’s keynote speech at the Goldman Sachs investor conference that while Apple picks acquisition targets based on opportunity, the company has a clear strategy if you look back at its acquisitions over the past three years. → Read More
Engagio, a social web platform for searching, discovering and following social conversations, has been acquired by marketing company Influitive, hot off the heels of its $7.3 million funding this past December. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal was a combination of cash plus stock. As a part of the acquisition, all five employees, including the founder and CEO William Mougayar… → Read More
Phunware, a company that specializes in enterprise branded mobile app infrastructure and experiences, just announced that it has acquired mobile ad company TapIt Media Group (not to be confused with the Australian NFC marketing company TapIt). The total purchase price was $23 million and the acquisition closed just before the end of the year on December 28. → Read More
Adobe announced yesterday that it had acquired New York-based company Behance. With 1 million members, the startup developed a LinkedIn for artists, allowing users to showcase their visual work. We just learned the financial terms from multiple sources. GigaOM first reported that it was north of $100 million. According to our sources, Adobe paid slightly more than $150 million in cash and stock… → Read More
Adobe just announced that it has acquired Behance, a New York-based online platform where creative professionals can showcase their portfolios and where businesses can find talent. The site currently has about 1 million members and hosts over 3 million projects. Adobe plans to integrate Behance’s community and portfolio capabilities with its recently launched Creative Cloud service, “allowing… → Read More
Palo Alto-based Corona Labs, a cross-platform mobile app development platform provider, today announced that it has acquired Dubai-based mobile game cloud services provider Game Minion, in a deal the terms of which were not disclosed. Corona recently raised $2 million in a round including Merus Capital and Western Technology Investment, in an add-on to its Series A intended to help grow its… → Read More
Earlier, it was rumored that Sprint was considering a buy-out of the remaining 48 percent of Clearwire shares it didn’t own, after the pending Softbank investment in its company promised to deliver it enough cash to negate the adverse effect of taking on Clearwire’s money-losing financials. Now, Bloomberg reports that Sprint is indeed looking to buy, in a deal worth about $2.1 billion according to… → Read More
Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue sent an interesting 31st tweet today. It’s a Foursquare check-in at Apple’s HQ, indicating that Cue is trying out the service at work. Moreover, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is spending a week in San Francisco. These two circumstantial bits of information incite speculation: could they be talking about an acquisition, or a deep software… → Read More
Google today announced their acquisition of YC alumni BufferBox, a Waterloo-based startup that specializes in providing users with temporary lockers to receive delivery of packages from online e-commerce retailers. The company is led by a founding team of three University of Waterloo graduates, Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah. The startup actually already shares a building with Google’s… → Read More
Zillow just announced that it has acquired the San Francisco-based rental and real estate search site HotPads for $16 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2012. This acquisition marks the first time that Zillow has acquired a primarily consumer-facing company and Zillow says it is making this acquisition to “expand the size of its growing rental audience and… → Read More
Geoloqi, the Portland, Ore.-based location-based platform that helps developers add location-based features to their apps, today announced that it has been acquired by Esri, a long-established GIS company that provides online mapping solutions for developers and geographic intelligence for business analytics systems. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. → Read More
Today in a Mannheim court a judge ruled that Motorola Mobility did not infringe a Microsoft patent that deals with allowing software applications to work with a phone’s radio antennas across a range of different handsets, without having to build a custom means of doing so for each individual device. It’s good news for both Motorola and Google, but overall the picture isn’t so rosy. → Read More
John Wiley & Sons, the 200-year-old publishing giant best known for its scientific, technical and medical texts and journals geared towards academic and scholarly audiences, appears to be on a mission to beef up its higher education business with a dose of technology. Following on the heels of its partnership with Knewton, the academic publisher has announced that it will acquire Chicago-based… → Read More
Google, according to a report by Forbes, has acquired Viewdle, an augmented reality and facial recognition startup. Forbes says the price was likely around $30 million, but we are still trying to confirm both the acquisition and the price. → Read More
Google has acquired Nik Software, the company behind Snapseed, the popular Instagram-like photo editing app for desktop and iOS. Besides Snapseed, though, the company also offers numerous other tools for amateur and professional photographers. The Nik Software team says that it has always “aspired to share [its] passion for photography with everyone” and that “with Google’s support [the Nik… → Read More
VirusTotal, an online malware and virus scanner, was just acquired by Google. The company already had a partnership with Google. VirusTotal will continue to operate independently and maintain its existing partnerships with other antivirus companies and security experts. The two companies did not disclose the details of the announcement. It is worth noting, however, that VirusTotal describes itself… → Read More
99designs, the polarizing crowdsourced design marketplace, announced its first acquisition tonight, as the Accel-backed startup scooped up its European rival, 12designer, for an undisclosed amount. In the near-term, 12designer will continue to operate as a standalone site.
Since raising $35 million from Accel, 99designs has been focused on international growth, said Patrick Llewellyn, the… → Read More
Stypi is a YCombinator backed startup that was recently acquired by Salesforce.com.
Their story details the mechanics for how a small company can manage an acquisition. It provides lessons for startups going through the process for the first time.
Stypi is a real-time editor that multiple people can edit at the same time. It also supports several programming languages which makes it an… → Read More
Google just acquired Sparrow, the company behind the popular iOS and OS X email client. The company’s team, says Sparrow CEO Dom Leca, will be joining Google’s Gmail team “to accomplish a bigger vision – one that we think we can better achieve with Google.” Sparrow raised a small seed round of funding from French VC firm Kima Ventures in 2011 but did not take any other outside investments since. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
