acquisitions Archive

Boston-based online advertising firm Burst Media has announced the acquisition of NY-based Giant Realm today. Giant Realm describes their service as, “an online media company that targets the tough to reach male 18-34 year old demographic by delivering original, high-quality content from respected voices in the hottest areas of entertainment – including gaming, film, television, humor, music and gadgets”. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

I’ve used Burst Media in some capacity since the mid-90s. Today I only use them to serve some ads on InsideTransit as the other networks in my chain have performed better in both CPM and fill rate. Last year Burst Media announced several niche ad networks including a niche online gamers ad network. I assume the acquisition of Giant Realm will help to strengthen the Burst ad networks.

Giant Realm raised just over $5 million since early 2008. The company is based in midtown although no information was provided as to whether they will move in with Burst either in NYC or in Mass.

Last month Kara Swisher provided a list of companies she thought might be acquired soon and Giant Realm was one of the names on her list.

Related: check out all of our Burst Media coverage.

Outsourced government email delivery services firm GovDelivery has announced the acquisition of social networking provider GovLoop today. GovLoop currently has 20,000 members according to a comment by Steve Ressler, CEO and co-founder of GovLoop. GovLoop launched in May 2008. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Carolyn Duffy Marsan at NetworkWorld has an in-depth post about the acquisition. Carolyn notes that GovDelivery is often referred to as “Facebook for Feds” and that the founders of both services met at Government 2.0 Camp back in March.

From the announcement, “GovDelivery’s reach has grown exponentially in the past two years. Currently, between 10,000 and 100,000 new people signup to receive updates to government information each day via the GovDelivery platform.” It looks like the two companies were made to work together as the email delivery can point recipients to the social networking platform. The companies believe that together they can help spread social media throughout the U.S. government.

Gautham Nagesh from NextGov notes that GovLoop was a pet project for Ressler.

Earlier today we learned that company database service TradeVibes was acquired by tech blog VentureBeat. Last year Duncan Riley provided a comparison of TradeVibes and competitor Crunchbase which is run by tech blog Techcrunch. TradeVibes has been rebranded and is now called VentureBeat Profiles. Riley noted today that the acquisition story was pitched as a competitor to Techcrunch.

When I read the acquisition announcement, I immediately thought about the tech blogs that use TradeVibes to power their company directories. When TradeVibes launched it seemed many of the popular startup tech blogs created partnerships with TradeVibes. I can only assume that a good bit of the traffic and attention with regards to TradeVibes came from these same partnerships.

Here are a few of the tech blogs that use TradeVibes/VentureBeat Profiles:

• Mashable – “MashCoInfo“
• Readwriteweb – “ReadWriteWeb Companies“
• Inquisitr – “Qbase“

Will the tech blogs currently using TradeVibes remain onboard that the service is owned by a “rival”? Could it usher in a new level of partnership between all of the TradeVibes powered blogs? Or will the blogs leave the service? The next couple of months should be interesting in the tech blogging space.

Google just couldn’t let Adobe have the acquisition spotlight for a minute. Today Google has announced the acquisition of ReCaptcha, the maker of a new style of captcha software. If you are new to the term “captcha”, it’s those annoying boxes that are typically attached to forms to make sure you are a human and not some sort of robot or alien life form.

Google notes that the acquisition could help with their OCR scanning projects for Google Books and the Google News archive search. From the acquisition announcement, “Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”

Apparently ReCaptcha powers the human verfication for over 100,000 websites. We use the service on our job posting form.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has more on the acquisition and what it could mean for Google Books. Additional coverage on Google Blogoscoped.

Google shares are up nearly 2% today (I doubt this acquisition has anything to do with the increase).

Update: Andrew Parker has more information about the founder of ReCaptcha, Luis von Ahn. Parker notes that this is the second acquisition by Google of a technology founded by von Ahn.

NY-based CA has announced the acquisition of NetQoS today for $200 million in an all-cash transaction.  CA trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol CA. NetQoS had annual revenue of $56 million in 2008 and has over 1,000 active customers worldwide.

The release talks about the combined technologies of both companies and the strengths for their customers. The combined companies, “will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services.”

They also discuss cloud computing and note, “As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.”

From the release, “At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit”. The release also notes that a “majority” of NetQoS’ 250 employees will remain on with CA.

The deal is expected to close by December 31.

Automattic, makers of the popular blogging platform Wordpress, have announced the acquisition of After the Deadline today. After the Deadline has created a contextual spelling and grammar checker. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released. Raphael Mudge, After the Deadline founder, has a post about the acquisition and the steps that led up to the eventual deal. Raphael talks about being rejected from YCombinator, comparisons to Microsoft spellcheckers and the “misused word” detection.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has a post detailing the spelling and grammar checker including his note that 1.4 million blog posts were published on wordpress.com blogs last week (the number only includes wp.com hosted blogs and not self-hosted blogs like CenterNetworks). Matt says he was “blown away” after looking at After the Deadline especially after learning just one person created the tool.

If you run a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you can download the spell checker as a plugin. Now there is absoutelly no reeson to spull a post wring.

Related: Automattic acquisitions of IntenseDebate and PollDaddy

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Online retailer Zappos, has announced that the company has been acquired by Amazon and will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Tony has posted a CEO letter that he sent to all of Zappos employees today. Marketwatch notes that the deal is worth $807 million and Hsieh mentions in the letter that it’s not a cash deal rather a stock deal.  Total deal value about $850 million including $40 in cash and restricted stock. 

Amazon expects the acquisition to close this fall. Hsieh notes that there are no plans to cut headcount and he and the other executives plan to stay on at Zappos.

From Marketwatch, Amazon said in a statement that under terms of the deal, it will buy all outstanding shares, warrants and options of Zappos in exchange for roughly 10 million Amazon shares with their value based on average closing prices in June and July. In addition, Amazon “will provide Zappos employees with $40 million in cash and restricted stock units,” Amazon said.

Update: Based on today’s Amazon share price, the deal is worth more than the $807 million reported in the Amazon release. It looks like the final price will be determined when the deal closes.

One can only wonder if Zappos awesome usage of Twitter played a part in the acquisition. Will Netflix be next?