Friday, March 7, 2014

February Acquisitions




As promised I’m going to inform my readers about most important acquisitions of the year. If in January I thought that it’s the beginning of the year which is due to great changes, now I can say that I changed my mind and decided to call 2014 an “acquisition” year.

Many biggest companies buy more and more companies. But the “Wow” acquisition of the year (and not only year - it’s one of the biggest tech acquisitions since 2001 when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion) became Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition. February also became the biggest acquisition month for LinkedIn. Let’s go by date:

5.02.2014 - Amazon Acquires Video Gaming Studio Double Helix Games
Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years. Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of their ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.

6.02.2014 - LinkedIn makes its biggest acquisition by paying $120m for Bright
LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition deal ever! Bright is a natural fit for LinkedIn as it makes a bulk of its revenue from its Talent Solutions group. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made several updates and launched new features to improve the process for recruiters - Bright may kick things up a notch.

11.02.02014 -Yahoo Acquires Social Diary Wander For A Price Over $10M
Originally, Wander was focused on sharing travel experiences in a diary, but soon pivoted focus onto an app called Days. The app lets users create a series of photographs and gifs in a package called a “Day,” which can be shared the next day. Days is about sharing an entire story of how your day went. 

13.02.2014 - Yahoo Acquires Technical Recruiting Startup Distill
Distill was working on a way to make technical recruiting easier by pairing video interviews and programming challenges. Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. 

14.02.2014 - Rakuten buys Viber for $900 million to expand digital empire
Rakuten aims to be the world's number one Internet services company, and buying Viber complements its strategy in the digital space. Viber has rocketed in popularity as a potential rival to Skype, announcing 100 million worldwide users in September 2011, and then more than 200 million in May of 2013. The Viber app is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows 8, Mac OS X, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or Wi-Fi connections. Besides providing Rakuten access to new markets, the deal will offer new potential markets for Viber through Rakuten users. 

SlickLogin is a small startup, whose product involves a unique, sound-based system for logging into websites.

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform with 450 million MAUs, which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! 

21.02.2014 - Apple acquires TestFlight creator Burstly

Burstly offers a full suite of products to power the entire app lifecycle. The app ecosystem is crowded but Burstly provides tools to help you navigate with ease. 

21.02.2014 - Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn't succeeding.

24.02.2014 - IBM Buys NoSQL Cloud Provider Cloudant
Based in Boston, the privately held Cloudant offers a hosted version of the ApacheCouchDB open source data store. Its own version, called BigCouch, can be run across multiple servers, providing a way to build and maintain an extremely large and fast data store for a front-end application. 

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