November Featured Acquisitions

The year of 2014 is coming to its end, but acquisitions don’t lessen. November was not the best deal month, though we can see some featured acquisitions from the world’s giants, such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

It was a successful month for video, photo, analytics and more, but not a social month at all. Very soon I’ll bring to your attention the “acquisition winner” of 2014. I already guess who it can be, but let’s wait one more month.

And here we go with November deals:

10 November – AppDirect Acquires Data Visualization Company Leftronic

AppDirect announced to acquire Leftronic, a data visualization startup that launched four years ago. Leftronic allows businesses to build custom dashboards visualizing important data. AppDirect co-CEO Daniel Saks told me that by integrating Leftronic’s visualizations, AppDirect can give its customers a dashboard for monitoring the status of their apps.

11 November - Yahooto Acquire Video Ad-Tech Firm BrightRoll for $640 Million

Yahoo announced a deal to acquire BrightRoll, a programmatic video-advertising platform, for $640 million in cash. The deal will combine Yahoo’s desktop and mobile video advertising inventory with BrightRoll’s platform and publisher relationships. BrightRoll’s net revenue is expected to exceed $100 million this year, and Yahoo said it expects the transaction to enhance its profitability.

13 November – Mail.ru Buys Maps.Me To Integrate Crowdsourced Maps Into Its Portal

Mail.ru - the Russian internet giant with 100 million users of its mail, social networking and other web-based services - has made an acquisition that will start to bring navigation and location-based services into the mix. It has acquired Maps.Me, a maker of map apps and other navigation services based on OpenStreetMap data and with the ability to work offline.The company will be integrating Maps.Me into its my.com platform.

13 November – Microsoft Buys Israeli Hybrid Cloud Security Startup Aorato In $200M Deal

Microsoft acquired Aorato, an Israel-based maker of security solutions co-founded by veterans of the Israeli defense forces, which only exited from stealth earlier this year. Aorato’s focus is on enterprise services in the cloud and in hybrid on-premise and cloud environments, using machine learning to detect suspicious patterns.

17 November - Groupon Acquires In-Store Analytics And Marketing Startup Swarm Mobile

Groupon announced that it has acquired Swarm Mobile, a startup that helps businesses connect with and track their customers while in stores. This continues Groupon’s pattern of expanding its offerings for local businesses beyond daily deals. Earlier this year, for example, it launched individual business pages and announced an iPad-based point-of-sale service.

18 November -  Merkle Acquires Loyalty Startup 500friends

Customer relationship management company Merkle announced that it has acquired startup 500friends. The startup’s LoyaltyPlus platform allows businesses to run customer loyalty programs in stores, online, and on mobile. It also allows them to identify the customers that are likely to have the highest lifetime value.

19 November - Google buys iOS app prototyping startup RelativeWave

Google has acquired RelativeWave, the team responsible for the popular iOS app prototyping software Form. Form is available for Mac and iOS, and allows designers and developers to create rich interactive app prototypes and run them on their iPhone or iPad. As part of the acquisition, RelativeWave has made Form available for free on the Mac App Store.

21 November - Yahoo Acquires Photo Startup Cooliris

Yahoo acquired Cooliris – a photo app-maker, in order to build inspiring products, grow engagement, and ultimately revenue. Cooliris was founded back in 2006 and was initially known for creating a “3D wall” for navigating photos and other media content.

25 November – VigLink Acquires Content Promotion Startup LinkSmart

VigLink just announced that it is acquiring Boulder, Colo-based startup LinkSmart. The details of how the two products will be integrated is still being worked out, and for now, LinkSmart will continue to operate as a standalone service.

October Growth Strategy

October M&A success list came a bit later­, anyway some great deals took place in many companies. What I’m thinking about is - calling 2014 a “Google Year” for its acquisition-driven strategy. I’ve been tracking the most important technology acquisitions since January and can say that no other company had so many deals during almost a year.

All the deals are purpose-driven in their own way, but no one can prove their success with the new companies. Let’s hope that all the startups will find a better settlement and a better potential with the world’s giants. 

Here are my top picks from the last month:

October 4 - Yahoo Acquires Mobile Messaging App MessageMe

Yahoo has acquired mobile messaging application MessageMe, a Whatsapp-like service with $11.9 million in reported outside funding. The company was largely able to raise such funds on the strength of its team and what appeared to be ever-quickening growth. Co-founders Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal had extensive experience in social gaming prior to founding MessageMe. 

October 6 - Luxoft Reports Acquisition of Radius Inc.

Luxoft Holding, announced that it has acquired Radius Inc., a US based solution provider focused on the growing Internet of Things (IoT) industry. Radius delivers modern enterprise solutions across mobile, cloud, data and application programming interface (API) technologies for select Fortune 500 clients to help them capture, manage, and gain value from their growing volume of enterprise data.

October 7 - Microsoft Said to Sign Letter to Acquire Israel’s Equivio

Microsoft has signed a letter of intent to acquire Israeli text-analysis startup Equivio, said a person familiar with the company’s plans, as the software maker bulks up products for analyzing data. Equivio makes software that uses machine learning to analyze legal documents and corporate information for use by law firms, corporations and government agencies. The company’s website lists the US Justice Department among its customers.

October 21 - Google Acquires Firebase

Google announced that it has acquired Firebase, a backend service that helps developers build realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web that can store and sync data instantly. Firebase currently has almost 110,000 registered developers on its platform and the Firebase team says that the service will continue to work as before and remain platform-agnostic. This is Google’s third major acquisition for its Cloud Platform this year.

October 24 - Google Acquires Oxford AI start-ups for DeepMind Project

Google has hired the founders of two Oxford University artificial intelligence start-ups and announced a partnership with the institution to further develop its DeepMind system. It is acqui-hiring the two academic teams of founders, seven people in all, behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, two deep learning startups based in the UK, and it is also partnering with Oxford University, which had spun out the two startups, to build out wider research efforts further in the area of AI.

October 24 - Google's Nest Acquires Smart Home Hub Startup Revolv  

Google announced it has acquired smart home hub startup – a Colorado-based Revolv which made a hardware hub with a bunch of radios packed inside to make all the various smart home devices talk to each other. Through the Revolv app, you could sync up smart home interactions. Revolv will work on Nest’s open API program called “Works with Nest” to “continue to unify the connected home".

September Procurements

Acquisitions are such a frequent occurrence these days that at the end of each month we are sure to face lots of exciting, eye-catching deals. September biggest acquisition cost $8.3 billion. It’s so interesting, when a company buys a startup for a “little” sum, we never know about the amount, but in case the deal cost $billions, it’s publicized everywhere.

September activists are Yahoo and Google with two acquisitions each. The list goes from Silicon Valley to biotechnology; mobile and games and lots of cloud, cloud and cloud. Let’s start with the first deal made by Genesys.

September 03 - Genesys Acquires CanaPlus Consulting

Genesys - the market leader in multi-channel customer experience and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises announced the acquisition of Singapore-based CanaPlus Consulting - a leading systems integrator that brings over a decade of expertise implementing Genesys solutions in the APAC region for large, multi-national financial services companies and other leading regional organizations.

September 05 - Yahoo Acquires, Shuts Down Luminate

Yahoo is buying Luminate, a startup founded in 2008 by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images-or, as we have called it in the past, an AdSense for images.

September 11 - Google Buys Lift Labs

Google has bought Lift Labs, the maker of a tremor-cancelling spoon aimed at improving the lives of people suffering from Parkinson’s and essential tremor. The acquisition marks a further move into the biotech industry for the Silicon Valley giant -and Google said it hopes to explore how the technology could be used in other ways to improve the quality of life of people with neurodegenerative diseases.

September 11 - BlackBerry Acquires Movirtu

BlackBerry has acquired a UK-based mobile technology start-up whose software allows users to have multiple phone numbers on the same device. The purchase of Movirtu helps BlackBerry ramp up its portfolio of services to cater to the needs of its core base of corporate and government clients. Movirtu's virtual SIM technology allows an individual to have both a personal and business number on a single mobile device, with separate billing for voice, data and messaging usage on each number.

September 13 – Google Acquires Polar

Google is bringing Polar over to Google+ in the hopes that the team behind the popular opinion-tracking service will be able to heat up Google's social network. Polar was founded approximately two years ago. Its current line of business, which it will be shutting down at the end of the year, is just what its name suggests: easy-to-use polls that can be filled out via various Web services and apps.

September 15 - Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang 

Microsoft announced it will buy Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion. The Mojang team will join Microsoft Studios, maker of popular video games Halo, Forza and Fable, among others.

September 22 - SAP To Acquire Concur Technologies

German enterprise software vendor SAP SE announced that it will acquire Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion, marking it its biggest purchase ever. Concur Technologies is a leading provider of integrated cloud-based travel and expense management solutions who has over 20,000 clients around the globe and is accessed by over 25 million users. Through the acquisition, SAP intends to further strengthen its presence in the networked economy. 

September 22 - Yahoo Buys Bangalore-Based Tech Startup Bookpad 

Yahoo has bought Bangalore-based Bookpad, a startup that's barely a year old and founded by three youngsters who passed out of IIT-Guwahati over the past three years. Bookpad's enterprise software product, DocsPad, allows users to view any document (like PDF, Word, Powerpoint), as also edit and annotate it, within a website or app. It works across devices, and does not require downloading of plug-ins or desktop software.

September 22 - Red Hat's Acquisition of eNovance

Red Hat acquired OpenStack pioneer eNovance to help bolster its global OpenStack portfolio. eNovance a leading provider of open source cloud computing services. Combined with Red Hat's existing leadership in OpenStack, the addition of eNovance's systems integration capabilities and engineering talent is aimed at meeting growing demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment.

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.