Tag: ACQUISITION

Don't check your calendar, it is actually 2009, and we have some news about ... Friendster? Founded way, way back in 2001 (before Facebook was even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye), Friendster was one of the original social networks. It was outpaced by competitors like MySpace and Facebook, though, and didn't show up in the public consciousness as anything but a punchline for years. Well, now ...

If you're not a developer, you're probably not aware that Google Docs has an API available for various document-related services. Recently Google added a new feature that allows developers to create applications that will pass an image-based (.png, .jpg, or .gif) document to the API, and using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, generate and pass back an editable text-based document. ...

Intuit, the company behind financial management app Quicken, has purchased Mint.com, a web-based personal finance tracker, for $170 million. Quicken already has a web version that plugs into its desktop software, and Mint apparently isn't going to replace it. Meanwhile, Intuit doesn't have plans to change the way Mint works, and the CEO of Mint is joining the company to direct its online ...

The Pirate Bay's recent surprise decision to sell to gaming company Global Gaming Factory and become a legal operation shocked fans of the popular torrent site. Now, it looks like the arrangement may fall through, after all. Torrentfreak is reporting that Wayne Rosso, the former CEO of Grokster who spent two weeks working with GGF to close the deal, has walked away from GGF and is not optimistic ...

Yahoo! has rejected the 10,247th buyout proposal to date from Microsoft. The New York Times reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and investor Carl Icahn made another offer to purchase Yahoo!'s search business on Friday night -- and gave the company 24 hours to respond. Because we've seen how well ultimatums work in the past. Unsurprisingly, The Yahoo! board rejected the offer. Now are you ...

There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you're hearing about Summize, here's a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string -- most importantly, an @name -- which makes it indispensable when Twitter's tracking function is down. Second, it ...

If you thought things were over between Microsoft and Yahoo!, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because now it's really, officially, super duper over. Yahoo! issued a press releases this afternoon making it clear that that not only will Microsoft not be purchasing all of Yahoo!, but Yahoo! won't be selling Microsoft even a part of its business. Not its search engine; not its email service; not even ...

WhitePages.com has announced a deal to purchase Snapvine, a company that provides voice applications for social networking sites. WhitePages plans to continue offering Snapvine's current services, including tools for "voice blogging," leaving voice comments on social networking sites, and adding voice comments to photos. But WhitePages also plans to roll out new services, including: Free, ...

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (or at least use Flickr without fear that Microsoft would start requiring WGA validation), Microsoft released a statement saying it's not quite done with this whole Yahoo! thing yet. No, the company isn't putting another bid on the table for an outright acquisition of Yahoo!, but Microsoft isn't ruling that out either. In a nutshell, ...

Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum. According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some ...

There must be something in the water this week. While the biggest new media acquisition story of the day has to be CBS buying CNET for $1.8 billion, big companies are swallowing up smaller ones left and right. Media company Comcast is buying social networking site Plaxo for something like $150 million, while Ask.com is shelling out an undisclosed sum for Lexico, the company that runs ...

CBS is buying CNET. For $1.8 billion in cash. While that might seem like a drop in the bucket compared to some buyout offers we've seen recently, that's still a lot of cash flowing from an old media company to a new one. CBS is no stranger to new media. The company purchased the internet radio service Last.fm last year. But according to a press release put out by CBS this morning, this ...

With all the talk of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! leading nowhere, there's one important thing to keep in mind: Yahoo! never said it was looking for a buyer. Microsoft's takeover offer never quite got "hostile," but it was unsolicted nonetheless. So now that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has decided to take his ball and go home, we probably shouldn't be surprised that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang released ...

OK, this is just getting silly. At this point, Microsoft has made its offer to purchase Yahoo!, been rejected, set a date in the sand, after which Microsoft would try to oust Yahoo!'s board of directors, and then let that date come and go without taking any action. And after all the tough talk, now it looks like Microsoft is finally starting to consider raising its asking price. The problem is ...

Microsoft has purchased Farecast, a travel pricing/comparison/booking service that competes with similar web services like Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak. What sets Farecast apart from other services is the site's focus on predictions. Based on trends over time, Farecast can help users predict whether prices will go up or down in the future. The Seattle Post Intelligencer says Microsoft paid ...