July Deals

As promised in the beginning of 2014, I bring to your attention the most important technology mergers and acquisitions for every month passing. In July we saw different deals starting from social, music, mobile to cloud.  All top social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter had new achievements. As in previous months the mentions of technology giants Google and Microsoft became regularly repeating ones. How far are they planning to go?

July 1 - Google Acquires Songza

Google announced to acquire the much-loved music service Songza in a bid to ramp up its Play Music offering. Songza is a unique player in the streaming music space. Rather than providing users with a la carte access to songs and albums, it offers up expert-curated playlists around mood, time of day and general theme. The service is available on the web, for iOS and Android, and even on Chromecast. For now, nothing will change for Songza users however, in the coming months, Google will "explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.

July 2 - Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio

Microsoft announced acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio. UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications.

July 2 - Facebook Acquires LiveRail

Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. A source tells us Facebook paid between $400 - $500 million for LiveRail, but Facebook refused to comment on the terms. The acquisition of the 170-person company could help Facebook own a bigger chunk of video advertising, the fasting growing Internet ad medium.

July 9 - ServiceNow acquires Neebula Systems for $100million

The enterprise cloud management platform ServiceNow announced it has agreed to acquire the Israeli startup Neebula Systems in a $100 million cash deal.  Neebula's flagship product, ServiceWatch, automates the discovery, mapping, and monitoring of IT-enabled enterprise services. Put simply, it allows a company to discover what kinds of systems and software are running in their IT environment, a preemptive step toward streamlining business processes. 

July 11 - Microsoft Buys Business-Focused Cloud Provider InMage

Microsoft acquired InMage, a startup that focuses on cloud-connectivity and data recovery for businesses. It’s working to integrate InMage's Scout technology into its Azure site-recovery service. The Scout product already works with Azure for data migration, and InMage will bring more business capabilities to the Microsoft service.

July 11 - Yahoo Acquires Video Streaming Platform RayV

Yahoo  acquired the video broadcasting platform RayV, built in 2005 as something of a Joost competitor, it is specialty lies in delivering high-quality video streams to a lot of people.

Jul 14 - LinkedIn Buys Newsle

LinkedIn is buying Newsle, a web app for surfacing news about people in your network. Newsle was founded three years ago and had about two million users at the time of the acquisition. The startup, which had raised more than $2 million in funding, uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to highlight news about your connections on Facebook and LinkedIn.

July 14 – Salesforce acquisition of RelateIQ a CRM game-changer

Salesforce acquires RelateIQ - a Palo Alto, Calif.-based intelligent computing startup for $390 million. It automatically captures data from email, calendars and smartphone calls to provide data-science-driven insights in real time, according to Salesforce's8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

July 17 – Twitter Acquires CardSpring To Power In-Tweet Commerce And Offers

Twitter announced it has acquired CardSpring to enable “in-the-moment commerce experiences.” CardSpring is an application platform that lets developers build card-linked offers electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies that work with credit cards and other types of payments. Twitter will keep the service open.

July 21 - Yahoo Buys Flurry to Jump-Start Mobile Business

Yahoo announced its buying the mobile ad exchange Flurry, a move that could augment Yahoo’s still-waning position in the mobile advertising market. Flurry is one of the biggest mobile ad firms in operation with a reach so vast it tracks more mobile phones than Google or Facebook. Such an acquisition would boost Yahoo’s ambitions to be a “mobile first” company, after it has struggled to match the growth of mobile ad revenues at rivals Facebook and Google.

July 23 - Google Acquires DrawElements

Google struck a small deal on Wednesday, agreeing to acquire a 3-D graphics company called drawElements. Based in Helsinki, Finland, drawElements produces a graphics test that helps companies make their software compatible with Google’s Android operating system. Google will fold the team into the suite of services that developers use to optimize their products for Android.

July 31 - Oracle Buys TOA Technologies

Oracle announced that it signed an agreement to acquire TOA Technologies - the leading provider of cloud-based field service solutions that optimize the last mile of customer service for enterprises by coordinating and managing activities between dispatchers, mobile employees and their customers.

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. 

16.02.2014 – Google acquires SlickLogin to kill the password

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

19.02.2014 - Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition

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. 

Be Where Your Customers Are!

Gone are the times of waiting on the phone to talk to a rep or waiting for an email response. Multi-channel marketing replaced many different activities and positioned in the first place.

“72% of online American adults now use social networking sites” (PewResearch Center)

Is it really so important to be where customers are and why?

The reason is that you should be in all the places where your customers are searching for information and help them find it, answer all their questions and do this as fast as possible. Customers raise their issues through social media and they don’t like to wait. If you’re late, you lose your customer – that’s the reality.

25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook or Twitter expect a response withing 1 hour (AmericanExpress OPEN Forum)

Being on social platforms not only gives you direct access to your customers, but also gives your customers direct access to you.

“97% of customer issues can be resolved by proactive social intervention. On top of that, 40-50% of those customers end up saying positive things about the company online” (Dell Investigation).

Whether these are social media channels, different forums, blogs, comments section of articles written about your company, you should be everywhere and be ready to take action.

And which social channels to use? Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are must-channels for nearly every field.

“Facebook has 1.11 billion monthly active users ” (Facebook)

“61% of social media users primarily use LinkedIn for professional networking” (Lab42)

“Twitter has over 550 million users” (StatisticBrain )

From my own practice, I can say that I made great relationships with many authorities in my field via Twitter  and I become happy with every new thousand followers I have.

I cannot ignore Google+ too, as once I noticed to have the most link clicks from this channel.

“70% of brands have presences on Google+ ”(Simply Measured)

Pinterest? Yes, it also became a very popular one and the number of users is rapidly growing.

“Pinterest has around 50 million users” (Reuters)

To conclude I’d like to say that social channels are not only a must, but should also be something like “useful and pleasant” – that’s the secret to your success!