Somehow I thought this year would be the end for the Blockbuster Express kiosk machines. Back in November they changed their pricing model and it seemed like it just became a lot more expensive to rent from Blockbuster Express versus rival RedBox. As an infrequent movie renter, I found the Redbox machines to have a better selection and a better price – and you can nearly always find a free movie rental code for RedBox.

Today RedBox has agreed to acquire the kiosks and “other assets” from Blockbuster Express.  RedBox notes in their release that the deal is worth up to $100 million. Interesting note, RedBox is actually owned by Coinstar, the company that makes the coin counting machines found in supermarkets. I use the Coinstar machines all the time because they charge no fee to convert the change into an Amazon gift certificate.

How long now before Netflix buys out Blockbuster mail service?

I also wonder what happens to all the codes for Blockbuster Express that I bought on Groupon/LivingSocial – better use those quick!

Here’s the email that I just received from their customer email list:

Dear Valued Customer,

NCR, which operates your Blockbuster Express kiosks, has entered into an agreement to sell its kiosks and other assets to Redbox. Until the transaction is completed (we anticipate in the third quarter of 2012), you will continue to enjoy the convenience, choice, and value you’re used to from BLOCKBUSTER Express. Until the sale is completed, we will continue to run the business as we have been, focused on bringing you the latest New Release movies with most titles only $2 for the first night. You’ll also notice that we’ve increased our In-Stock Guarantee value so you will now enjoy a movie night on us with a value of up to $3 if we don’t have the New Release movie you want in stock.

As a reminder, we still have 100s of great movies available at $1 and additional nights of all movies are still only $1, all part of preserving an exceptional value for an affordable night of entertainment.

We’ll continue to provide you with information on any changes that result from this recent announcement but for now we just wanted to say thanks for being our customer.

Sincerely,
Justin Hotard
General Manager

Find more stories about: acquisitions, blockbuster, NCR, RedBox

Announced this morning, Q&A and “expert chat” service Sprouter has found a buyer in fellow Canadian company Postmedia Network. It was back in July that Sprouter founder Sarah Prevette announced that the service would be closing due to lack of revenue. In August, the Sprouter team noted that they wouldn’t be shutting down and that they were in discussions with several parties to continue the service. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed although the people I’ve spoken with this morning all assume it was very small but were pleased that the service will live on.

Sprouter put together a faq about the aquisition where they note that the acquisition price won’t be disclosed. It looks like the company will be run as a division of Postmedia Network and is looking to hire a business development expert.

They also have provided a description of what Sprouter is, “…where founders get help with their startups. Sprouter allows entrepreneurs to get curated answers to small business questions from people who know what they’re talking about.” The Postmedia network describes their offering as, “the largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers in Canada, representing some of the country’s oldest and best known media brands.”

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Canada, Sprouter

The big story today outside of the OMG white OMG iPhone OMG was the acquisition of the Delicious bookmarking site. Former owner Yahoo has sold the bookmarking service to the founders of online video sharing service YouTube and their new company AVOS. In reviewing about 20 blog/news posts about the acquisition, so far there has been no chatter about the acquisition price.

Back in December, Yahoo hinted that they would close Delicious service – a move I noted would hurt Yahoo within the developer/early adopter tech community. I also thought the best place for Delicious would be to be acquired by commenting service Disqus. I still think Disqus should consider expanding into bookmarking as it would make the service more sticky and could provide even more benefits to publishers.

This evening I received an email from Yahoo regarding the Delicious acquisition. There are a couple of interesting bits that got me wondering exactly what did YouTube founder Steve Chen and Chad Hurley purchase? I assumed when I read all of the copies of the press releases that the Delicious site would be put onto a blu-ray disc, handed off to AVOS, and then the entire service would be available as it is today but now hosted by AVOS.

It appears that the only bookmarks that will be available after the transition period is complete in July are those where a Delicious user has selected to move their bookmarks and opted-in to the new terms of service.

Here’s the portion of the email that discusses my point:

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks
– Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.
– After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

Yahoo does explain why you should move your bookmarks over to AVOS which includes the ability to keep the bookmarks you have worked to save, ability to keep using Delicious today and into the future, and that the design won’t change (huh?).

So I am left wondering what percentage of current Delicious users will actually spend the time and move their bookmarks over? I have to imagine the percentage will be low for a few reasons:

• Delicious began operations in 2003 – how many users from the early days no longer even control the email account they registered with?
• How many users don’t even care about their bookmarks from so many years ago?
• How many users just don’t want to spend the time to do the move?
• How many users have no interest in keeping their bookmarks?

I fall into the last category – I was never a huge Delicious user to begin with but I am not sure I even care about what I saved. I am sure someone like RWW writer Marshall Kirkpatrick has already transferred over his bookmarks – I know he has always talked about how important the service is to his story research. But for casual users, will they even read the email Yahoo sent to me and everyone else?

I guess to some extent AVOS acquired the power of the Delicious brand and I am sure both very smart entrepreneurs knew going in that not everyone would transfer their bookmarks over to AVOS.

Perhaps this is best – AVOS begins their Delicious management with a set of very passionate, early adopters ready to help grow the service all over again.

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, delicious, social bookmarking, YouTube

Online video search/ads provider Blinkx has announced the acquisition of ad network Burst Media today. The deal will be made up of stock and cash with a total value of $30 million. Congrats to the Burst team who have been cranking online ads since the earliest days of the banner ad.

Ryan Lawler at GigaOm notes, “Blinkx will pay $4.5 million in cash as part of the deal, with the remainder being paid through the issuance of new shares of stock…In exchange, Blinkx expects Burst Media revenues of around $33-$34 million.”

This is an interesting acquisition for me as I was one of the first publishers with Burst Media way back before there was a YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. It’s been interesting to watch Burst change (or not) over the last decade. I’ve often said that they didn’t move fast enough as ad creatives changed.

The main reason I’ve stayed with Burst over the last few years is because of their member forum. The community on the forum is great and provides a very diverse view of online advertising across a wide variety of industries and niches. I sure hope that Blinkx doesn’t shut the forum down after the acquisition is complete.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, blinkx, Burst Media

AT&T (NYSE: T) has announced plans to acquire the United States edition of T-Mobile for $39 billion. The transaction will be made up of $25 billion in cash plus the balance in AT&T common stock. The announcement notes that the price could vary slightly to make sure that Deutsche Telekom receives at least a 5 percent equity ownership interest in AT&T. Both boards have approved the deal – now it will get some U.S. government review.

The cash portion of the deal will be financed from new debt and cash on the AT&T balance sheet.

Couple notes from the acquisition release:

• “With this transaction, AT&T commits to a significant expansion of robust 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) deployment to 95 percent of the U.S. population to reach an additional 46.5 million Americans beyond current plans”
• “As part of the transaction, Deutsche Telekom will receive an equity stake in AT&T that, based on the terms of the agreement, would give Deutsche Telekom an ownership interest in AT&T of approximately 8 percent. A Deutsche Telekom representative will join the AT&T Board of Directors.”

People I talked to at SXSW who use T-Mobile seem to like the service but I rarely hear of people using T-Mobile. Typically I hear of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint as carriers when I talk to our customers and/or startups showing me their mobile apps.

Update: I like Brett Nordquist’s comment, “Congratulations to Apple for bringing the iPhone to T-Mobile.”

Update 2: CNBC money guy Jim Cramer noted, “Tacit admission that $T needed more infrastructure to handle its business…”

Find more stories about: acquisitions, AT&T, T-Mobile

Earlier this month AOL (NYSE:AOL) acquired the Huffington Post blog for $315 million. I posted on Twitter that I wondered if online video hosting service Viddler would be next for the “new” AOL. I still think the acquisition makes sense for both companies.

AOL has a large number of brands (and will be even larger once the above acquisition is complete) and I have to imagine that video will be a large piece of AOL’s pageview generating strategy going forward. Today AOL has a video site and they also own the Truveo video search engine.

Viddler currently works with AOL’s Engadget tech blog for their gadget videos. AOL’s Techcrunch blog uses Ooyala for their video hosting and this hosting could easily move to Viddler if there was an acquisition. It appears that the videos on AOL’s video site are self-hosted.

I am not 100% sure but I think Viddler has only raised some angel funding (which is quite impressive considering they are in the video hosting business). Viddler also received $50,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners last April. Viddler lists a team of 16 people based outside Philly and in Poland.

My guess is that AOL could acquire Viddler for a very reasonable price and bring a strong base of video hosting, video analytics and monetization inside the company. If there was an acquisition, Viddler would become the corporate hosting platform. This central repository would help AOL cross-promote videos across all of their channels. There is tremendous opportunity in cross-promotion that AOL is losing everyday by hosting with so many different video partners. For example, when you are finished watching the latest iPad 3 unboxing video on Engadget, you could jump over to Techcrunch to watch the latest TechCribs video.

AOL would also gain the ability to use their internal ad sales team to sell and integrate video ads across all of their properties.

The only question I am left with regarding a potential acquisition is whether Viddler would remain open to other companies to use — they currently host video content from a variety of companies including Gawker and the Cheezburger Network.

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, AOL, online video, Viddler

Last night sure was interesting — everyone on Twitter was bitching about the Groupon ads, cheering for the Chrysler ad, and there was very little actual football chatter from what I could tell. Then at 9:01 Pacific time, the conversation on Twitter changed in the tech sector. Kara Swisher and the NYT posted that the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL. Congrats to everyone involved – looks like this was a very large acquisition for the content network that recently acquired a number of blogs and technology providers.

What I immediately thought was, “wow, this fits perfectly with the AOL Way where they want to generate massive pageviews with little work”. Last week I put a URL into my bookmarks for later usage on a story about content scraping. The URL was from a post on HuffPo about some topless photos of actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently Wilde did a shoot (she was covered) in FHM magazine. The reason the link was interesting to me is that FHM magazine goes after any outlet that posts their images online. So could the HuffingtonPost really have posted these images? NOPE! What do you get when you land on the page titled, “Olivia Wilde Goes TOPLESS In FHM France (PHOTOS)”? You get one tiny paragraph of content and a link to another website. But you also get thousands of pixels in other non-related “stuff”.

When you put something in parens (Photos, Video, etc.) in a story title, you expect that the thing is actually located within the post.

So what did AOL pay for when they acquired HuffingtonPost for $315 million? Did they get one of the biggest SEO plays out there? Today on the investor call, Ariana Huffington said something about how they create quality content at cost-effective prices. I am not a regular reader of the HuffingtonPost – mainly because every link I follow ends up being a scrape or a let down in quality or quantity of content.

I am certain that most of the content on HuffPo is probably of good length and quality — but is it these types of articles that drive the pageviews to let them create the other quality content?

But let’s take a look at one example — last night Christina “Genie in a Bottle” Aguilera performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl. She messed up and missed some of the words. I wanted to see what the press was saying about her fumble so I headed over to Google and typed in her name (actually only part of her name, the rest was courtesy Google Instant).

On the first page of results is a blog entry from Huffington Post titled, “Christina Aguilera Nude Pictures Leak (PHOTOS)”. So I clicked it, not because I want to see Xtina naked, but because I just knew that it would be a dupe of the Wilde story above. And sure enough, I was unfortunately correct! Below is a graphic I made showing the page about Christina and as you can see – the blue box is content and the red is everything else. Oh and…the blue content is a scrape from another site! There is not one photo of Christina naked but there are about 100 “tags” – I wonder how long it took someone to enter all of the tags displayed below?

Wasn’t Google supposed to fix this issue?

I sure hope that this isn’t the type of content we will see coming soon from Engadget.

Here’s the Christina “nude pics” page (click to view the larger version):

Find more stories about: acquisitions, AOL, blog, Blogging, blogs, Huffington Post

The big chatter this Cyber Monday morning comes from Vator.tv who has found some details that Google has acquired Groupon for $2.5 billion. The notion that Google will acquire Groupon has been going on for a while now with Kara Swisher reporting on Google’s interest earlier this month.

If we look back to Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner in 2007, Google quickly killed one of the most awesome display advertising programs and replaced it with AdSense for RSS Feeds which frankly has been a big dud.

While Groupon and FeedBurner are completely different services, my fear is that if Google does acquire Groupon, the Groupon Adwords spend will be gone – replaced with “house” ads that pay close to nothing pushing the new service.

Earlier this year AdAge posted some internal Google documents that showed the biggest spenders on Google AdWords. Groupon competitor Living Social was listed as one of the top Google AdWords advertisers with a total spend of $2.29 million for June 2010. When was the last time you visited a website and didn’t get hit with a cupcake image ad for Groupon or a burger image ad for Living Social?

As the group buying category continues to grow, all of the companies in the space are spending mad money on Google AdWords. These ad buys flow (after Google’s cut) to web publishers. I also wonder what will happen to the local advertising space if these group buying sites begin to get acquired en masse.

Other forms of advertising that would most likely be terminated if Groupon is acquired by Google include cashback and CPA deals with a variety of the deal sites.

Selfishly, web publishers should hope that Groupon doesn’t sign the acquisition documents. For (at least) the short-term, it would mean a larger AdSense check.

And just to be clear, Groupon should take the money.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Google, group buying, Groupon

Last month AOL made three large acquisitions: video service 5min, tech blog network Techcrunch and Thing Labs (makers of the Twitter client Brizzly).

Louis Gray reported that the Thing Labs acquisition price was $18 million with a total including earnouts of $30 million. Peter Kafka reported that the 5min acquisition was an all-cash deal valued at somewhere between $50-65 million. Most have suggested the Techcrunch sale price at between $25-40 million. (Om Malik originally broke the news of the Techcrunch acquisition.)

Assuming all three acquisition reports are correct, that would mean a total acquisition price of ($18 + 50-65 + 25-40) between $93-123 million. So assuming the lower numbers are correct, that would fall in line with today’s announcement.

Update: the AOL 10-Q notes the 5min sale at $64.7 million (that’s what Kafka initially reported) which leaves $32.4 million for Techcrunch and Thing Labs. If Gray is correct that Thing Labs was acquired for $18 million, that would leave $14.4 million for Techcrunch, a much lower number than the $25-40 million reported by some outlets. But the only confirmed number at this point is the 5min acquisition price so the other two are still a mystery. These amounts don’t include the earnouts – much of which I assume goes to TC because it’s critical that some of their staff stay on board.

AOL has released their Q3 earnings today and the announcement includes a short brief regarding the acquisitions. Total price for all three: $97.1 million plus $23.1 million in earnouts over the next three years. They were able to lump all three acquisitions together which means we may never know exactly what each acquisition price was.

Here’s the bit regarding the acquisitions, “In late September 2010, we completed the acquisitions of 5Min Media, Thing Labs and TechCrunch for $97.1 million in the aggregate, net of cash acquired. In addition, we have agreed to pay an aggregate of $23.1 million in total to certain employees of the acquired companies over the next three years contingent on their future service to AOL.”

Find more stories about: 5min, acquisitions, AOL, Brizzly, TechCrunch

We first wrote about NYC-based taxi sharing app CabEasy nearly two years ago. The concept of taxi sharing is pretty simple: you post a request noting the departure time and your travel plan (e.g. from 125th and Broadway to Canal St.). Other members of the service can view all available travel plans and select one that is close to the trip and time they plan to take. You meet the other party at the designated location and share a taxi to both destinations.

Last month NY-based CabCorner announced the acquisition of CabEasy. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. CabCorner also provides a taxi-sharing service.

Back in March we wrote about CabSense which took historical taxi data to create an application that shows you the best place to hail a taxi based on your current GPS location. Last month CabCorner signed a deal with the parent of CabSense, Sense Networks to integrate their location finder into CabCorner.

Last month we wrote about a new taxi sharing app, FareShare. They will be providing a demo of their mobile app next week at the NY Tech Meetup.

As a public transit fan, I’d love to see taxi sharing take off but I fear that the combinations just make it too hard to complete enough rides to make it a sustainable project. These services will need massive marketing efforts to get enough riders into the system to find potential matches. I actually think that “time” will be more difficult to match than location.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, CabEasy, nextNY, NYC

HP has announced that they will acquire Palm for $1.2 billion. Palm’s current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is expected to remain with the company.

It’s so interesting to me to watch how Palm went from “iPhone killer” to basically dead in the water in just about a year. Back in October, I suggested that Palm would have been better off focusing on non-valley mobile developers instead of caring only about the valley. Who knows now if they would have taken that suggestion if they would have gained more platform awareness and more consumer interest.

I hope that we will all do a deep dive into why Palm wasn’t able to grab the market share that it seemed everyone thought they would when the Palm Pre launched.

Under the terms of the deal, H-P will pay $5.70 per Palm share, a 23 percent to Wednesday’s closing price of $4.63. The NYT notes that shares in Palm have fallen 52 percent over the past 12 months.

Read more on the NYT and Paid Content.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, mobile, Palm, Palm Pre

One of the few startups I pay good money to every month is Zipcar. The car sharing service really is quite amazing. If you haven’t heard of car sharing, here’s a very simple overview. In a variety of cities around the world, people share cars. The cars are typically located around a city center and can be rented by the hour or day. With Zipcar, gas, maintenance and insurance are included in the rate. And for me, the cars are so close that it’s almost like I have my own car except that I can only use the car when it’s free. And with Zipcar, your key can be used in any city that Zipcar operates.

This morning I received an email from Zipcar that they have aquired UK-based car sharing service Streetcar. From their acquisition announcement, “When the transition is complete, you will have access to more than 1,000 cars in the city of London and the surrounding areas. So, when your plans take you across the pond, whether for business or pleasure, grabbing a Zipcar will be even easier than it is today.” Honestly, I can’t wait to travel to London (once the ash is gone) because I’ve always wanted to drive on the wrong side of the road!

The WSJ says the deal is worth about $50 million and Streetcar had 2009 revenues of $25 million.

Some of the comments on the Techcrunch post seem to indicate this was a firesale. Another car sharing service, Canadian CityFlitz ceased operations late last year.

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, Zipcar

NY-based consulting firm Perks Consulting has announced the acquisition of social media consultancy Esultancy today. Esultancy is also based in New York City. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

From the announcement, “As of today, the companies will begin the execution of the acquisition in which Oz Sultan will be retained as an executive advisor to Perks Consulting through 2011.  Khayyam Wakil, of Esultancy, will join the Perks Consulting team as Social Media Director.”

Oz is a big name in networking and social media here in NYC. Along with Brett Petersel (from Mashable), Oz runs the Next Web meetups. You can follow Oz on Twitter.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, nextNY, NYC, social media

By now you probably have heard that reMail, an email search client for the iPhone, has been acquired by Google and was removed from the AppStore. What is a little bit more interesting in my eyes is a look back at how reMail has evolved. Let’s take a look at what reMail looked like in version 1, and what has changed.

In the very first business plan Gabor showed me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can’t talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.

reBoxed

Even before the first version of reMail was available, Gabor made some good press by creating reboxed. Basically it was just a way to learn about the GMail API along with fetching and displaying emails. But what reBoxed did, was force you to prioritize between two of your GMail contacts. You could select if emails from your boss are more important than emails from your team-leader or girlfriend.

Version 1.x

A month later, on May 11th 2009, version 1.0 of reMail was released. In this first version of reMail, you didn’t download all of your emails to your iPhone. Instead, you paid a monthly fee to reMail and then submitted your email credentials. reMail then connected via IMAP to your email servers, downloaded all your emails to their servers and started indexing them. The search was extremely fast and smart.

reMail Search doesn’t just search the subject, to, and from – it’s full-text search of your email, on your device.

Even better, reMail Search works offline! You can search your email when you’re driving through a tunnel or when you’re in a plane. Our server syncs emails you’re likely to search for on the device, and you can search them even when you’re offline. When you’re offline, you can search your entire email archives – with older search results coming from reMail’s server.

Maybe you already see the problem: you allow reMail to connect and download your emails. Many people wanted a better email search than what Apple had included in the iPhone’s mail application. But handing out credentials is something very sensible. TechCrunch Jason Kincaid noted:

The biggest issue, though, is privacy. ReMail works by sucking in your messages from your IMAP server and hosting them on its own server, which is optimized for rapid searching. Cselle says that the server is secure and that all messages are encrypted, but acknowledges that ReMail does have access to your Email. The company vows never to access or read any of it, unless they are given written permission to do so in the case of a support issue.

Version 2.x

So instead of connecting and indexing the emails on reMail’s servers, the version 2.x of the application (released in August 2009) downloaded all or selected email folders to your iPhone. One of the biggest challenges the team had to overcome was the limited storage space on your iPhone. Hundreds of thousands of emails can easily add up to several Gigabytes of data. But they managed to make it work! And 100,000 emails only needed 500 MB (5.12 KB/email) when downloaded and indexed. The initial price of the iPhone app was $4.99, and was increased to $9.99 after September 1st.

On September 21st reMail for GMail was launched. It allowed you to connect a single GMail account to reMail. The price was $1.99.

The business model of reMail changed on December 14th 2009 once again. Instead of charging for basic features like GMail connectivity, the basic features are now free.

Support for Gmail and Google Mail accounts is included for free. You can purchase IMAP support inside the application,by clicking on “Buy reMail Features”. IMAP support costs $3.99:

In November 2009, reMail announced the availability of a $0.99 reMail version for Rackspace customers.

reMail version 2.11 seems to be the last released version of the application before Google bought the small and smart startup. In an interesting move, somebody has claimed to reverse engineer reMail and release it as open source. Personally I don’t think this is ok, but I can also understand that people seem to depend on reMail and the possibility to search emails very fast and in an easy way.

I really hope Gabor can fulfill his vision of email at his new job at Google.

Editor’s note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Corsin Camichel, Google, reMail

reMail founder Gabor Cselle has just announced on the reMail blog that the service has been acquired by Google. Cselle notes that he will be re-joining the Google Gmail team as a product manager. I say re-joining because Cselle worked as an engineering intern on the Gmail product back in 2004. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

If you aren’t familiar with the service, reMail is an email search for the iPhone. reMail was part of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class.

Cselle notes that the reMail iPhone application has been removed from the iPhone App Store and will no longer be available for purchase. He notes, “You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We’ll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we’ve enabled all paid reMail features for you.”

With all of the Gmail Buzz talk as of late and with their team apparently having to work overnight for a few days (the horror!), more product managers will be welcomed to the team.

Update: In the comments, Paul Short makes a smart prediction, “Ah ha! I’ll bet you one cupcake and a subway ticket that reMail ends up as an app on one of those Google phones! (as if it’s not obvious already…).”

Find more stories about: acquisitions, gmail, Google, reMail