acquisition Archive

London-based Alterian has announced that the acquisition of NY-based Techrigy. Techrigy describes their service as, “providing visibility into social media for anyone managing brands and reputations online, SM2 combines a massive data warehouse of online conversations with state of the art search, analysis and reporting tools.” Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Alterian reported a 73% increase in revenue for the last fiscal year. Here’s an interesting tactic…to get Alterian’s current customers to test out the Techrigy service, they are offering a free trial which can then be converted into a premium account should the customer wish to continue use.

David Eldridge, Chief Executive Officer of Alterian said, “By combining Alterian’s platform with Techrigy’s SM2 technology, marketers now have a complete, easy and practical solution to understand the complete view of their customers and take action to use this to build brand equity and generate opportunity.”

As social media reporting becomes more important for companies, we will see more acquisitions in this space by larger agencies wanting to provide the tools for their clients in-house.

Former Techcrunch editor Ouriel Ohayon is reporting via The Globes that social search Delver has been acquired by Sears. Yes, the powertools and "sponsored conversations" company Sears. The acquisition price for the Israeli-based startup was not disclosed. Ouriel notes that the price is probably not that high as the company was running out of cash.

Delver raised $4 million in a Series A round. About a month ago the company announced that they would either sell or close the company as they were unable to raise another round of funding the tune of $6-8 million.

The Globes notes, "Delver co-founder and CEO Liad Agmon will move to the US and become a VP at Sears. Delver’s employees will continue to work in Israel and the company will operate as a Sears’ development center."

Movie news and reviews site Movies.com has been acquired by Fandango. Fandango is owned by Comcast and Movies.com was owned by the Walt Disney Internet Group. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nielsen/Netratings reports that for May 2008, Fandango reached 6.3 million monthly unique visitors, while Movies.com served 1.9 million monthly unique visitors. There was apparently very little overlap in the users.

Rafat Ali at PaidContent notes that Fandango’s ad team will sell advertising on both sites. He also spoke with Disney who said that a dozen of its Disney Internet Group employees will be reassigned because of the Movies.com sale and no layoffs are expected.