2015 – Starting a New Year with the Best Tech Deals

The internet of things? Can we learn about the future peering into the past? If so, this year will also be a promising one, as 2014 has been marked as the most active year in technology. Before that, 2000 was the most active one.

Numerous acquisitions happen each month, but to make my posts shorter, I select the most important deals only. Surely they are important from my personal point of view; anyway hope that my readers will share the same opinion.

The same “giants” all the time – as if conquering the heights. Do they need the products or the talents, or maybe both? Never remember any company announcing about that.

Year started with social deals – two Facebook acquisitions with two-day interval – not bad. Then Twitter joint the list with its ZipDial acquisition. Ok, let’s switch to the list, not to miss anyone. 

06 January - Facebook Acquires Wit.ai to Help Its Developers With Speech Recognition and Voice Interfaces
Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in voice control and speech recognition. The platform will remain open and free.  

08 January - Facebook Acquires Video Compression Startup QuickFire
Facebook acquired video-compression company QuickFire Networks, further underscoring the social networking giant’s increasing focus on video. Based in San Diego, QuickFire says, it can quickly convert video formats and allow them to be downloaded with less bandwidth and without a loss in video quality. 

20 January – Twitter Acquires India-Based 'Missed Call' Startup ZipDial

Twitter announced that it has acquired Bangalore-based ‘missed call’ marketing platform, ZipDial, which assigns companies a special phone number which their brands can use in print ads or TV commercials. Customers can call the number and hang up before they are charged for the call. In turn, brands can phone or send text messages about their business to the ‘missed callers’. ZipDial’s clients include Unilever, Disney, Gillette, Amazon, Facebook and, of course, Twitter, whose customers have used the platform for placing orders, receiving coupons or entering contests. 

20 January – Microsoft Acquires Text Analysis Startup Equivio, Plans to Integrate Machine Learning Tech into Office 365

Microsoft announced it has acquired text analysis software startup Equivio, which uses machine learning to let users explore large, unstructured sets of data. The startup’s technology leverages advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sort documents into themes, group near-duplicates, and isolate unique data. 

21 January – Apple Buys UK Startup Semetric to Power up Its Media Analytics
Apple has acquired Semetric, the London-based startup behind music analytics service Musicmetric.  While Musicmetric seems an obvious fit with iTunes and Beats Music, Semetric has also been working on analysing data for games, TV, movies and books so will enhance Apple’s understanding of data around all the digital products it sells. 

23 January – Microsoft to Acquire Revolution Analytics to Help Customers Find Big Data Value with Advanced Statistical Analysis

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics - the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. This acquisition will help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics. 

23 January – Mobile Network Three to Buy O2 in £10bn Deal 

Asia’s richest man is poised to take control of the UK’s biggest mobile phone network, after Three announced it had started exclusive takeover talks with its larger rival 02. The deal would create the UK’s largest mobile phone firm with 31.5 million customers, cutting the number of network owners in the UK from four to three.

Year in Review - 2014 Record-Setters

A great year passed, another one awaits. It really passed so fast and now I think if I should continue my monthly acquisition reporting another year. It was quite interesting for me to see the world’s giants becoming even more powerful with every new deal. I don’t remember any deal to be unworthy. Correct me, if it’s not so.

Google was the winner by the number of deals made in 2014. AT&T made the “mammoth” deal of the year. I cannot, but express my personal opinion - I consider Oracle the best deal maker of the year, as my career changed with one of its acquisitions during 2014. 

I pulled together the best deals of 2014 and all the mentioned acquisitions are game-changing purchases:

Google

• Google Buys Nest ($3.2 billion)
• Google Buys Skybox Imaging ($500 million)
• Google Buys Deepmind ($500 million)

Facebook

• Facebook Buys Oculus - $2 billion
• Facebook buys WhatsApp - $19 billion

Oracle

• Oracle Buys Micros Systems - $5.3 billion

Microsoft 

• Microsoft Buys Mojang - $2.5 billion

Apple

• Apple Buys Beats - $3 billion

Lenovo

• Lenovo Buys Motorola - $2.9 billion

Comcast

• Comcast buys Time Warner - $45 billion

AT&T

• AT&T buys DirecTV- $48 billion

August – another “Google” month!

So many exciting acquisitions take place every passing month! And social acquisitions became an inseparable part of my mentions – Twitter and Facebook continue growing their kingdoms. 

But it’s the second time I call my list a “Google” month, as most important acquisitions occurring in August were Google’s achievements: in May Google had 6 acquisitions, in August - 5, starting from a travel guide to cloud-based software. Who is the target for the next month?

August 1 - Twitter Buys Password-Sharing Startup Mitro

August started with Twitter acquiring password-sharing startup Mitro. Founded in 2012, Mitro’s primary product is a web browser extension that allowed users to store  and share passwords.  Mitro team will join Twitter’s location team in New York, focusing on a variety of geo-related projects!

August 6 - Google Acquires Emu, Texting With Built-In Assistant

Google has acquired Emu - the app creates reminders from messages based on time and location, as well as showing movie times and schedule restaurant reservations from text message.

August 6 – Google Acquires Directr, An App For Shooting Short Films On Your Phone

On August 6^th Directr has been snatched up by Google. It helps users and businesses shoot videos that were a bit longer than your average Vine — think ads, or promo clips, or family holiday videos. The Directr product will live on under its own branding, but the team behind it is joining YouTube’s video ad team.

August 7 - Facebook Buys Secure Server Technology Provider PrivateCore

Facebook announced to acquire PrivateCore, a Palo Alto-based secure server technology company. PrivateCore’s early users have included large financial institutions and a Non-Governmental Organization funded by the US government. PrivateCore’s technology, however, could protect Facebook users’ private data better.

August 17 - Google Acquires Smart Travel Guide Startup Jetpac

Google is buying the travel app startup JetPac founded in 2011. The technology is a system of algorithms that can be trained to recognize different elements within photos, creates visual city guides by analyzing photos from social media to infer key information about the places they were taken. Google will integrate the app's artificial intelligence technology into its image search and map services.  

August 23 - Google Acquires Mechanical Engineering Firm Gecko Design

Google’s forth acquisition of the month became Gecko Design, a small, Los Gatos, Calif.-based company specializing in product design for consumer electronics. The five-person industrial design shop was founded in 1996, specializes in developing consumer-electronic products, working with engineers early in the process before manufacturing begins. Gecko’s clients have included FitBit, Logitech , Sonos and H-P , according to the company’s website.

August 26 – Google Acquires Zync To Bring Visual Effects Rendering To Its Cloud Platform

And the final Google acquisition in August was a Boston-based Zync Inc., the maker of Zync Render,“cloud-based rendering software.” That’s software that helps movie studios take simple, computer-generated pictures of things like a giant robot bashing through a wall and make it look real. Zync’s data and technology will be integrated into the Google Cloud Platform, and move off Amazon Web Services.

August 29 – Amazon buys Twitch
Amazon and Twitch have officially announced the deal, which will see Amazon purchase all outstanding shares of Twitch for roughly $970 million in cash. Twitch is the largest live-streaming website in the US, a live video-game-streaming site with more than 55 million users that's like YouTube for video games.

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.

April – Acquisitions Go On

The number of dominating companies grows. Strong companies buy smaller ones, increasing sales and therefore the revenue as two companies together are more valuable than two separate ones. April continues acquisitions. Will they all have chance of success, are they all worthwhile? 

No one knows…

April 01 - Velocity Acquires Global Cloud Hosting Company Titan Technology Partners

Velocity announced the acquisition of Titan Technology Partners. Founded in 1998, Titan serves Fortune 500 and midmarket organizations in North America, Europe and Asia and maintains offices in Charlotte, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; London, England; Pune, India; and Singapore. It’s a provider of global cloud hosting and managed services, business process outsourcing (BPO) and consulting services.

April 02 - Harvest Technologies to Be Acquired by Stratasys

A Belton, Texas based additive manufacturing service bureau Harvest Technologies entered into a definitive agreement for Stratasys acquisition - a leading global provider of 3D printing and additive manufacturing solutions. 

April 10 - IBM Acquires Silverpop to Boost its Online Marketing Personalization Products

IBM purchased Silverpop, which specializes in managing personally-customized Internet promotions. Silverpop assembles profiles of individuals from social media sites, Web usage, email and other digital signals. IBM plans to integrate Silverpop's technologies into its own marketing services.

April 14 - Google acquires UAV maker Titan Aerospace

Google has acquired Mexico-based drone maker Titan Aerospace - the drone startup that makes high-flying robots which was previously scoped by Facebook as a potential acquisition target. Google is interested in Titan Aerospace as its solar-powered drones can fly continuously for 5 years, which makes them idea to bring wireless internet to remote destinations, such as Africa.

April 15 - Motorola's Enterprise Business Sold for US$3.45 Billion to Zebra Technologies

Zebra Technologies acquired Motorola's Enterprise business for US$3.45 billion in an all-cash transaction. Illinois-headquartered Zebra has been known for its RFID and real-time location solutions.

April 15 - Twitter Acquires Longtime Partner and Social Data Provider Gnip

Twitter has acquired Gnip, the social data provider that has long provided access to public Twitter data, and that has deepened its relationship with the social network over the years through a series of product and partnership announcements. Gnip offers access to historical Twitter data, and the full Twitter data firehose, but it also offers APIs that provide data from other social networks including Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, Bitly and more.

April 17 - Dropbox acquires Loom

Dropbox acquired Loom, a popular service that offers cloud-based photo storage. Dropbox and Loom share many of the same ambitions, but unfortunately, the agreement also spells the end for Loom.The company has immediately halted new signups, and the service will shut down permanently on May 16th. Users can choose to automatically export their photos to Dropbox — and they'll automatically receive the same amount of cloud storage they previously had with Loom or customers can opt to receive a .zip file containing every image they've uploaded to Loom's servers.

April 24 - Facebook acquires ProtoGeo Oy, maker of fitness tracking app Moves

Facebook acquires ProtoGeo Oy, a Finnish software company that’s most well-known for making fitness tracker app Moves.  Facebook adds another stand-alone app to its growing stable.