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.

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".