NHN acquires Me2Day
Web 2.0 Asia is reporting that Me2Day, a Korean microblogging service likened to Twitter, has been acquired by Naver, the most popular search portal in Korea. Founded in February 2007, Me2Day was bootstrapped and angel funded. Me2Day is purportedly "a big proponent of open web technologies." A cursory glance at the Me2Day site reveals that they allow login by OpenID, something its U.S. equivalent has yet to do. Naver was launched in June 1999 and has since grown to be the most popular search portal in Korea. In October 2007, comScore ranked Naver, owned by NHN Corporation, as the fifth most used search portal in the world. There is no word on how Naver plans to incorporate Me2Day functionality into its offerings.
Announcement Date: December 22, 2008
Deal Value: $2 Million
SynthaSite acquires Clickpass
Easy site building service Synthasite has acquired Y Combinator startup Clickpass, which launched earlier this year. Synthasite has raised $5 million in capital and Clickpass just raised the Y Combinator seed round . Clickpass helps make OpenID more accessible to users by allowing them to use their accounts on services like Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN to log in to other sites. This is essentially what OpenID was built for in the first place, but it has taken many months for major companies to actually implement the standard (though they have been making strides lately). Clickpass technology will be used to make it easier for users to import content from other services into their SynthaSite pages. Possibly, SynthaSite acquired Clickpass for its talent rather than its lofty goals of bringing OpenID to the masses.
Announcement Date: December 19, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
XING AG purchases socialmedian
XING AG (Germany) has acquired New York-based socialmedian Inc., an innovator in the social news industry. The socialmedian solution enables people to get the news filtered by their social networks. socialmedian debuted in 2008 and has rapidly grown a highly engaged user base. socialmedian is thus a natural fit with XING, a leading global online social network for professionals. Combining XING with socialmedian's next generation social news technology offers great potential to deliver highly engaging content and services to business professionals. Time-strapped professionals are left to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own. socialmedian does this for them, gathering information from about 19,000 sources, including social services such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, the international blogosphere, and industry and online media sources, and then filtering news through users’ social networking contacts. This enables people to get the news they need to know for their jobs, their interests, and their passions through the people in their networks.
Announcement Date: December 19, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Noobis acquires 3rd Floor Intelligent Media
Noobis, Inc. has acquired 3rd Floor Intelligent Media, a Canadian social media and technology company. The acquisition includes existing intellectual property and retains the company’s technologist David Sockett as the new Chief Technology Officer for Noobis. Not only does this give Noobis a foot-hold in the No.1 country for social networking use, but access to cutting edge technology development. This includes a proprietary SCORM-compliant Flash content engine and technology to allow cross social-network applications and multi-user lobbies. According to a November 2008 press release by comScore, Canada was #1 in the world for social networking use with 87% of online Canadians accessing social networking sites. Since 2000, 3rd Floor Intelligent Media has been creating widgets, social networking applications, online learning modules, and customized programs for Fortune 500 companies, and government contractors in the U.S. and Canada.
Announcement Date: December 15, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
United Internet acquires United Domains
Lycos has sold the domain registrar United Domains to United Internet. United Internet is the parent of companies such as 1&1 and the Adlink group, which also encompasses Sedo. According to United Internet’s press release, United Domains offers registrations in over 100 TLDs for 180,000 customers and 1.1 million domains.
Announcement Date: December 13, 2008
Deal Value: $45 Million (Cash)
Bisnode AB acquires Wer Liefert Was
Swedish digital business information provider Bisnode AB has agreed to acquire the German company Wer Liefert Was (WLW) from the Italian group Seat Pagine Gialle. WLW, based in Hamburg, provides supplier search services on the Internet. The company has 250 employees and reported sales of €34.5 million in 2007. Bisnode, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is one of Europe's leading providers of digital business information, including credit reports, company and consumer information, direct marketing tools and market information for the general business-to-business market. The company has some 3,200 employees in 19 countries, and reported revenues of kr3.9 billion in 2007. Bisnode is owned by Ratos AB (70%) and Bonnier Holding AB (30%).
Announcement Date: December 2, 2008
Deal Value: $50.9 Million (Cash)
SinnerSchrader acquires advertising business of newtention
SinnerSchrader is strengthening its Performance Marketing division by taking over the advertising sales business of Hamburg-based ad management specialist newtention technologies GmbH. At the same time, SinnerSchrader and newtention have agreed on far-reaching cooperation to further develop newtention´s leading n7 profiling, targeting and ad management technology and to position it on the market. SinnerSchrader is a leading interactive agency in Germany founded in 1996, has been listed on the stock exchange since 1999, and has over 200 employees in Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. newtention technologies is now one of the leading independent providers of ad server technology in Europe. With just under 20 specialists, the company develops and markets individual ad management solutions for the online industry.
Announcement Date: December 1, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Six Apart acquires Pownce
Blog software company Six Apart is buying Pownce and is shutting it down. Pownce is a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose. It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart. Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzz-worthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share. Additionally, rumor has it that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox.
Announcement Date: December 1, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Twitter acquires Values of n
Twitter, the micro-messaging company that recently turned down a $500 million stock acquisition offer from Facebook, gets the assets and intellectual property of Values of n, including its smart sticky-note software and its personal-assistant application that works over e-mail, texting, and the web. In 2006, Values of n raised at least $500,000 from First Round Capital, Magnus Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures. The primary goal of the acquisition appears to have been to bring Rael Dornfest to the Twitter team. Dornfest is the founder of Values of n and former CTO at O’Reilly Media, whose responsibilities also included editing the O’Reilly Hacks series. He was also the head of the RSS-DEV group, which created the RSS 1.0 standard.
Announcement Date: November 25, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Jamplant acquires Yahoo’s Kelkoo Unit
Yahoo has sold its Kelkoo unit, an online shopping engine, to UK-based private equity firm Jamplant for an undisclosed amount. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for $576 million. Kelkoo is a comparison online shopping engine, in which customers can input the name of the product they want to purchase and see who is selling it and for what prices. Jamplant is a newly formed private equity firm seeded by several angel investors.
Announcement Date: November 25, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
WebVisible acquires Adapt Technologies
WebVisible, Inc., a worldwide leader in local online advertising, has acquired Adapt Technologies, Inc. (Adapt SEM), a developer of web-based applications for automating the management of search engine marketing campaigns and providing recommendations on various aspects of keyword selection, bidding and optimization. WebVisible is a global leader in local interactive advertising, offering simple and affordable online advertising campaign management for small and midsize businesses with an emphasis on customer conversions and proven return on investment.
Announcement Date: November 20, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Gannett acquires Ripple6
Gannett Co., Inc. has acquired Ripple6, Inc., a provider of social media services. Ripple6 will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gannett and will continue to offer its best of breed social media technology and analytics not only to Gannett but also to an array of top tier marketers and web publishers. Gannett believes Ripple6 is richly innovative and can change the way social media is offered and monetized online. Ripple6 will join Gannett’s other enterprises in fueling the growth of its digital business, which seeks to apply innovative technology and content solutions to the needs of all its customers. With the Ripple6 platform, Gannett can help users create communities and connect with their friends and family in highly pleasing ways, while providing marketers with innovative advertising opportunities and measurable results.
Announcement Date: November 13, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
UK web hosting company buys WestHost
British web hosting company UK-2 Group has acquired Utah-based web hosting provider WestHost.com, completing its expansion plans in the U.S. hosting market.
Announcement Date: November 13, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Innovation Interactive acquires Netmining NV
Innovation Interactive, the parent company of 360i and SearchIgnite, has acquired Netmining NV, a leading provider of landing page and on-site behavioral optimization technology headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. The move bolster's the company's ability to increase conversion rates from all visitors to a marketer's web site, as well as improve the return on advertising spend (ROAS) that a marketer receives from online media purchased to drive customers to their site. Netmining's behavioral targeting solutions will continue to be offered as a standalone product, but will also be strategically integrated into the SearchIgnite optimization platform in the 1st half of 2009.
Announcement Date: November 11, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
SpectrumDNA Inc to acquire Revyver
SpectrumDNA, Inc. is acquiring Seattle-based digital design firm Revyver. SpectrumDNA, Inc. owns and operates a range of cutting-edge digital brands. Revyver is slated to become a label within the SpectrumDNA family of companies and would operate as a subsidiary of SpectrumDNA, Inc. Revyver CEO, Bryan Veloso, is a creative visionary who has worked with some of the most innovative firms in the social media industry. He was the second designer at the social networking giant Facebook. He also designed for Automattic, the creators of WordPress. The self-taught prodigy started designing at age 13 and started blogging about web design in 2004. His blog Avalonstar, http://avalonstar.com, won the 2006 SXSW Best Blog Award. Veloso founded Revyver in 2006 after leaving Facebook to focus on bringing superior design and world-class applications to markets that haven't benefited from them yet. Revyver's clients have included Flock and Mashable, among others.
Announcement Date: November 10, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
imwave acquires move marketing's performance search marketing business
imwave, inc. has acquired move marketing’s performance search marketing business. imwave will immediately take over all of move marketing’s advertiser relationships and search engine marketing campaigns. imwave believes that this acquisition clearly solidifies its position as one of the largest super affiliates in the industry focused on paid search engine marketing.
Announcement Date: November 7, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Adknowledge acquires advertising business of Lookery
Adknowledge announced that it has significantly expanded its position in the social ad network by acquiring the advertising business of Lookery. The addition of the Lookery ad network increases the total ads displayed by Adknowledge through its social ad network, Cubics.com, to more than 10 billion monthly. This accounts for over 40% of all ads served on Facebook applications according to internal Adknowledge estimates. Cubics.com also displays ads on applications on MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, and Bebo. After partnering with Lookery for several months to serve ads on the Lookery ad network, Adknowledge moved to acquire the ad network assets.
Announcement Date: November 6, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
InternetArray acquires majority stake in Noobis
InternetArray, Inc., an Internet development, technology licensing and marketing company, has acquired majority ownership in Noobis, Inc., a social media development company. Noobis develops and integrates social media applications and networks. In addition to building its own Internet assets and technologies, Noobis works with clients and partners to leverage the emerging social media marketplace. This acquisition is a first step in the company’s new strategic focus in developing collaborative Internet-based business partners. This is the first project under IA’s strategic focus of concentrating upon Internet business opportunities.
Announcement Date: November 5, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Masterseek acquires Accoona
International B2B search engine Masterseek, which was founded in Denmark in 1999, has acquired American search engine Accoona. Accoona received great attention upon its launch in 2004, when the former U.S. President Bill Clinton was the speaker at its opening. Accoona has since achieved particular success in China, where Accoona has supplied the search function to both Sina.com and Sohu and has an exclusive partnership with China's most widely-read daily newspaper, China Daily News. In 2006 Accoona was elected by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites. Last year Accoona planned a flotation at 700 million USD on London's Aim Tech. However, this was not realised due to the hard pressed market for raising capital. With the acquisition of Accoona, Masterseek will fortify itself in its fight to become one of the largest B2B search engines in the world. The acquisition means that Masterseek will improve its company data and at the same time significantly increase the number of its users.
Announcement Date: November 5, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Adknowledge buys Adonomics
Adknowledge, a behavioral targeter focusing on social networks, has purchased Facebook analytics firm Adonomics. Adonomics tracks application traffic for developers and has been growing since its launch soon after the launch of the Facebook platform. Adonomics’ data will be merged into Cubics, an online ad network for social net apps which Adknowledge purchased last December.
Announcement Date: November 3, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
ESPRE Solutions to acquire OpenACircle.com
ESPRE Solutions, Inc., a media solutions and technology company with an innovative and patented video compression technology, is acquiring Blideo, Inc., a private company dba: OpenACircle.com, an online collaboration company. ESPRE Solutions will acquire OpenACircle.com to enhance each company’s presence in the competitive and rapidly-growing web collaboration market. The web conferencing and collaboration sector is the most established market in the web-based video space. Under this arrangement, ESPRE will provide the technology OpenACircle.com needs to ensure ease-of-use and overall quality of their product, while OpenACircle.com will provide ESPRE with an established market to which they can deliver their technologies.
Announcement Date: November 3, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Perfect Market acquires Media River Technology
Perfect Market, Inc., a marketing services firm for publishers that specializes in "lighting up" underutilized content and creating additional revenue from these assets, announced today that it has acquired MediaRiver's patent-pending technology for matching content and advertising to any web page on the fly. The technology reads the contents of a web page and responds with highly relevant content and advertising to match the page. MediaRiver's targeting solution helps publishers and advertisers reach engaged users by efficiently tapping search, display, and widget networks. Perfect Market helps users find valuable content that they may have previously missed. By combining MediaRiver's targeting and optimization capabilities with Perfect Market's existing technologies and business, the companies are creating an even more efficient end-to-end service.
Announcement Date: November 3, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
FreshAddress acquires business unit from Return Path
FreshAddress, the leading provider of permission-based email change of address (ECOA) services, announced it has signed an agreement to purchase Return Path's ECOA business. Through this purchase, FreshAddress will acquire Return Path's old/new email address change-pairs, hygiene technology, client and partner relationships and related patents, among other provisions. The acquisition establishes FreshAddress as the undisputed source for email change of address information and represents the beginning of the company's aggressive growth-through-acquisition strategy.
Announcement Date: October 30, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Razorfish acquires Wysiwyg
Microsoft's digital marketing subsidiary Razorfish has acquired Spanish digital advertising firm Wysiwyg. Razorfish said acquisitions in Europe and emerging markets will counter the downturn in the U.S. market. The company aims to generate a third of its revenue outside the U.S. by the end of 2009. Madrid-based Wysiwyg has 55 employees who will be retained on completion of the acquisition. Microsoft acquired aQuantive, the parent company of Razorfish, for $6 billion in 2007 to enhance its footprint in the interactive advertising space.
Announcement Date: October 30, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
TubeMogul is acquiring Illumenix
Online video reporting company TubeMogul Inc. has acquired Flash analytics firm Illumenix Inc. in a deal designed to beef up its reporting for video publishers that use its service. With patent-pending technology, Illumenix enables deep analysis of how users view online video. By putting a single line of code into their Flash video players, publishers can see how viewers interact with their content, yielding data such as time of engagement, viewer drop off, and user interaction with other events that happen within the video. If you are already a customer of TubeMogul as a distribution tool, they can give you Illumenix analytics for your own site, along with the company’s distributed analytics. Another use case is to help video sharing and social networking sites to unlock their analytics so that they can share that data with their content partners, their advertisers, and with their uploaders.
Announcement Date: October 29, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Akamai Technologies acquires acerno
Akamai Technologies is acquiring acerno. The acquisition of acerno, a unique online co-operative of shopping and purchase data for enabling more relevant online advertising, is expected to greatly enhance Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions, a new product line also being announced. These new Akamai solutions will enable online advertising businesses to boost the performance of their online marketing investments by driving smarter advertising decisions based on relevant audience segments.
Announcement Date: October 22, 2008
Deal Value: $95 Million (Cash)
Acresso Software to acquire Intraware
Acresso Software, a provider of digital delivery and management services, is acquiring Intraware, Inc., a privately-held company of Thoma Bravo. The Intraware SubscribeNet service is a web-based delivery and support platform that enables technology companies to deliver, track and manage the software, licenses and other digital content they distribute to their customers. Combining forces with Acresso and Thoma Bravo presents an attractive opportunity for all stakeholders involved. The resulting company will have an even more significant presence in strategic data management.
Announcement Date: October 20, 2008
Deal Value: $27 Million (Cash)
Technorati acquires AdEngage
Technorati has acquired AdEngage, an advertising network. The AdEngage platform will remain a free standing, branded service, and Technorati will also launch a version of the platform under its new Technorati Media brand. This follows Technorati’s August acquisition of BlogCritics, a network of blog content. AdEngage, which was founded in 2004, sells advertising for 4,000 sites, and has 13 billion ad impressions per month. Many of those sites are adult oriented, so Technorati isn’t merging it with its core service. Instead, they’ll launch a separate version of it under the Technorati Media brand in a few weeks. The current Technorati Media offering is for larger sites that Technorati partners with. When the AdEngage platform launches, smaller blogs can sign up as well and, it is hoped, command relatively higher advertising rates by grouping with similar blogs in spheres of influence.
Announcement Date: October 16, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Automattic acquires PollDaddy
Automattic Inc., creator of the WordPress blog platform, has acquired PollDaddy, an Ireland-based provider of online polling widgets. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls. There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March, and Gravatar, a universal avatar system last fall.
Announcement Date: October 16, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
RSDV to acquire AptHost.com
Rancho Santa Monica Developments Inc. is acquiring AptHost.com Communications USA Inc., a provider of Social Media Hosting, worldwide. AptHost.com is a strategic addition to the Rancho Santa Monica Developments business. The acquisition will extend Rancho Santa Monica Developments into the ever-growing web hosting and technology industry. AptHost.com has seen an expansive growth in the hosting industry by providing a unique service that gives clients the capability to upload and stream videos on their website. Special software installed and managed by AptHost.com allow scripts such as PHPmotion and Clip-Share to run flawlessly, allowing website owners to have a website similar to YouTube. With social media and video sharing taking the Internet by storm, RSDV expects to see dramatic growth in the coming years.
Announcement Date: October 15, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Accel-KKR acquires Endurance International Group
Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm, announced the acquisition of a majority equity stake in the Endurance International Group, Inc., a privately held provider of online applications and services. Endurance is one of the largest providers of website hosting and online applications and services in the world and ranks among the top 10 for domain names under management worldwide. The company utilizes a multi-brand approach to provide web services and solutions tailored for various market segments, including small and medium-sized businesses, individual consumers, non-profits groups and large enterprises. Endurance supports multiple brands worldwide and manages over one million domain names.
Announcement Date: October 15, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
Omniture acquires Mercado Software
Omniture Inc., a provider of online business optimization software, has agreed to acquire certain assets of Mercado, a search and merchandising solution provider. The additional technology and expertise gained will expand Omniture’s solutions for site search and merchandising, particularly in the retail sector. The Mercado solution is already integrated with Omniture SiteCatalyst through Omniture Genesis. It has been one of the most popular Genesis integrations because it can improve conversion by automatically increasing the relevance of site search results based on business analytics such as product popularity, affinity and revenue. Mercado had raised over $70 million in VC funding, including a 2004 recap.
Announcement Date: October 15, 2008
Deal Value: $6.5 Million (Cash and assumption of debt)
Teleflip sells assets to undisclosed buyer
Teleflip, a provider of free email service to mobile phones, has sold its assets to an undisclosed buyer. The company had raised nearly $5 million in private equity and debt funding from firms like GRP Partners and Hercules Technology Growth Capital. In a statement, Hercules said that Teleflip had been written down to a fair value of $0.00 in the first quarter of 2008, and that the sale represented a recovery of $0.02 per share in NAV.
Announcement Date: October 7, 2008
Deal Value: Undisclosed
eBay acquires Classifieds Sites in Denmark
eBay Inc. has acquired Den Bla Avis and BilBasen, providers of leading online classifieds sites in Denmark. Classifieds are the preferred e-commerce format in Denmark and represent an attractive and growing market. The addition of Den Bla Avis (dba.dk) and BilBasen (bilbasen.dk) to eBay’s global classifieds portfolio positions the company as a leader in the online classifieds market in Denmark and further strengthens the company’s world-leading portfolio of online classifieds sites that already includes Marktplaats, Kijiji, LoQUo, Gumtree and mobile.de. eBay’s online classifieds business now has a presence in more than 20 countries and 1,000 cities.
Announcement Date: October 6, 2008
Deal Value: $390 Million
eBay buying Bill Me Later
eBay Inc. is acquiring Bill Me Later, the number two online-oriented payments brand. The acquisition extends the company’s leadership in payments by combining Bill Me Later with eBay’s PayPal, the number one online-oriented payments brand. eBay believes Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to its portfolio and PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together. eBay will now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later can better meet consumers’ needs both on and off eBay by allowing them to quickly, safely and easily purchase the items they want online and pay for them immediately or over time. With one payment relationship, retailers and eBay sellers can offer two of the web’s most innovative payment methods, which have been proven to increase sales and deliver higher average selling prices for merchants.
Announcement Date: October 6, 2008
Deal Value: $945 Million (Cash $820 million and $125 million in outstanding options)
Seller Revenue: $150 million (FY 2009 est)