Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million

via allthingsd.com

LinkedIn announced on Thursday it has acquired mobile news aggregation startup Pulse, as Kara Swisher reported last month that it would, signaling another step by the massive professional network toward becoming an online content powerhouse.

It’s a big buy for LinkedIn, costing a cool $90 million, according to the company.

The app, which collects news articles from a range of topics chosen by users and presents them in a clean, stylish format, rose to the top of Apple’s App Store ranks just a few years ago, quickly becoming a favorite among the many newsreaders currently available. Pulse currently claims more than 30 million users globally who read more than ten million stories daily using the app.

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Twitter acquires We Are Hunted, readies standalone music app

via news.cnet.com

Twitter acquired the music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app, CNET has learned.

The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

Twitter Music, which is set to arrive in the wake of key competitor Facebook overhauling the music section of its News Feed, shows Twitter taking new steps into becoming a full-fledged media company. The app acknowledges the key role music has played in drawing new users to the service -- particularly younger, mainstream users. Pop stars have some of Twitter's most popular accounts, with followings in the tens of millions. The TwitterMusic account has 2.3 million followers -- not a bad perch from which to launch an eponymous app...

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Rumor: Google negotiating $1 billion acquisition of WhatsApp

via digitaltrends.com

Messaging app WhatsApp is in the negotiating phase over prices with Google in what could be Google’s next billion dollar acquisition, according to an inside source.

While the deal started four or five weeks ago, we’ve been told that WhatsApp is “playing hardball” and jockeying for a higher acquisition price, which currently is “close to” $1 billion right now.

We’ve suspected for some time now that a messaging app would be the next billion dollar acquisition deal following Facebook’s Instagram buy-out last year. 2012 was the year for photo-sharing apps, which you know everything about by now. So, 2013 has been dominating by the messaging app-meets social network market.

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Dropbox Buys Mailbox - Promises To Help It Grow

via readwrite.com

Things have been going great for Mailbox, the sleek iOS email app that advertises its ability to "put email in its place." Developed by Palo Alto-based startup Orchestra Inc., Mailbox has grown immensely since its February launch - its now delivering more than 60 million emails a day and has taken more than 1.3 million reservations in a unique system that staggers users' access - and builds anticipation. And on Friday, Dropbox bought the company for an undisclosed amount.

Mailbox attempts to reduce the impending email overload down to nothing. It lifts the inbox above Gmail's 'All Mail' folder and turns it into a productivity center where incoming items lie in wait to be organized. A swipe to the right archives or deletes the message, while a swipe to the left sets up a time-based reminder or adds the folder to a custom list. That way, everything can be addressed immediately (or at least in one session) and put where it needs to be. Through archiving, conversions deemed finished are still accessible via search. The "archive, search and never delete" email mindset is increasingly popular -Mailbox gives you a clean starting point...

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Facebook buys Microsoft ad platform Atlas

via theverge.com

Facebook has officially bought Microsoft's Atlas advertising platform. In a statement, the company said Atlas would give advertisers a better idea of how their campaigns were doing and would "help advertisers compare their Facebook campaigns to the rest of their ad spending across the web on desktop and mobile." Atlas, Facebook says, is already in use by many advertisers on the site, but the company is planning to build out both its measurement systems and its user interface, making it easier to use and offering a more complete picture of campaigns. As Facebook works to monetize its system, this will become particularly important — despite fast growth, it's been hard to find good metrics on how well its ads actually work.

Though Facebook doesn't mention it, owning an ad serving platform could also let it provide ads on sites outside its own, making it a competitor to Google and its AdSense platform. The Facebook and Microsoft deal was previously rumored in December, and we're still not sure how much Facebook paid for the service. AdAge suggested previously that it was expected to sell for less than $100 million; Microsoft originally acquired aQuantive, which provided the technology, for around $6 billion.

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The Reason Facebook Is Buying Atlas

via allthingsd.com

Given the likelihood of Facebook buying Microsoft’s Atlas platform, lots of speculation has swirled around what the social network company would want to do with the ad server. The popular answer: Facebook is looking to take Atlas’ capabilities at operating across the Web, combine them with Facebook social graph data, create a new ad network and go after the third-party ad serving business. In other words, the argument goes, Facebook is looking to go head to head against Google/DoubleClick.

That might be part of the play here. But I hardly think that’s the whole answer.

To my mind, an Atlas play would really be about attribution.
After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. Google is a perfect example here: It’s incredibly easy to draw a straight line from the keyword you advertise on, to the text you deliver to a searcher, to the landing page you send the searcher to — and finally to the sale (or failure to make a sale). It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history.

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Dell Confirms Plan to Go Private in $24.4 Billion Buyout Deal

via allthingsd.com

Michael Dell, the founder of the computing and technology company that bears his name, confirmed today that he intended to buy it back from shareholders. In a deal announced this morning, Dell and Silver Lake Partners will buy out the company’s existing shareholders in a transaction worth $24.4 billion.

The deal values Dell at $13.65 a share, amounting to a 25.5 percent premium over the closing price of $10.88, where Dell was trading on Jan. 11 before the first reports of renewed interest in a buyout transaction emerged.

The deal also brings together private equity fund Silver Lake with software giant Microsoft, and represents the latest step in a relationship that began when Microsoft bought out Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.

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Now Dell's Board Is Voting On A $24 Billion Buyout Backed By Microsoft

via businessinsider.com

A $24 billion deal to take computer maker Dell private faces one last hurdle: The company's board is voting on the offer tonight, Bloomberg reports.

According to multiple reports, Silver Lake, a buyout firm will invest $1 billion or more; Microsoft will invest $2 billion; and founder Michael Dell will contribute his 16 percent ownership of the current company and $700 million for a majority stake.

The deal will also be backed by $15 billion in debt.

Besides Michael Dell, who's the board chairman, Dell's board includes Facebook investor Jim Breyer, former American Airlines CEO Don Carty, and Ross Perot Jr., among others.

Silver Lake is known for doing big technology deals like the 2000 leveraged buyout of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

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Amazon buys text-to-speech software company Ivona

via engadget.com

If you go buying a text-to-speech software maker, you're not exactly going to stay quiet about it, right? Amazon this morning announced its acquisition of Ivona, the company behind the Kindle Fire's Text-to-Speech, Voice Guide and Explore by Touch features. Ivona, currently carrying the tagline "an Amazon company" on its site, offers its technology in 44 voices in 17 languages. It also works closely with organizations for the blind and visually impaired. More information on the acquisition can be found after the break.

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Adobe buys Behance, sees the value in designer community

via gigaom.com

There’s even more proof this week that designers are the new rock stars of the tech world. Adobe announced on Thursday that it has acquired Behance, a community site for designers’ portfolios. Adobe will integrate Behance into its own Creative Cloud community and tool-sharing site that it launched for designers and developers earlier this year.

The companies didn’t release terms of the deal. Behance, founded in 2006 and now with 32 employees, has 1 million users and hosts 3 million projects. Earlier this year Behance raised a $6.5 million round from Union Square Ventures, along with angels Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Path founder Dave Morin, designer Yves Behar, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp, Chris Dixon, and Dave Tisch.

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Sprint buys up the rest of Clearwire for $2.2B

via gigaom.com

Sprint followed through on its bid to buy the remaining portion of Clearwire that it doesn’t own, and will spend $2.2 billion or $2.97 per share to complete the deal, the operator announced Monday. The deal by Sprint, which already owned 51.7 percent of Clearwire, values the 4G provider at about $10 billion, including net debt and spectrum lease obligations of $5.5 billion.

Sprint’s bid offers a 128 percent premium over Clearwire’s closing share price right before Sprint confirmed it was talking to Softbank about an investment on October 11. And it’s slightly more than the $2.90 a share Sprint offered last week, according to a regulatory filing. Softbank’s decision to invest $20.1 billion to buy a 70 percent stake in Sprint provided Sprint with $8 billion in cash, making the deal possible.

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Cisco Buys Meraki For $1.2 Billion

via businessinsider.com

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Cisco Inc. agreed to pay $1.2 billion for closely held Meraki Inc., adding technology that helps businesses manage Wi-Fi networks remotely and expanding its lineup of products for mid-sized customers.

Cisco, the world’s largest maker of computer-networking equipment, is using a combination of cash and retention-based incentives to pay for the acquisition, the San Jose, California- based company said yesterday in a statement.

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Disney acquires Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion, plans more Star Wars movies

via engadget.com

Disney is already one of the biggest media companies around, and it's now set to become even bigger. The company announced late today that it's acquiring Lucasfilm Ltd., currently 100 percent owned by founder George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in a cash and stock deal. That of course includes the rights to both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, as well as Lucasfilm properties like Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. What's more, the press release announcing the deal also confirmed that Disney is now targeting 2015 for a release of Star Wars: Episode 7, and that its "long term plan is to release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years." No word yet on a proper release of the original, original trilogy.

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Here’s what’s behind SoftBank’s $20.1B Sprint deal

via gigaom.com

Japanese mobile operator SoftBank plans to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint for $20.1 billion. The deal would give the cash-strapped U.S. carrier an $8 billion cash infusion and gives the Japanese carrier a foothold and spectrum in the valuable U.S. mobile market.

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I Sold Two Startups For $150 Million, And Here's How I Did It

via businessinsider.com

Last year, Chris Dixon sold a startup he founded, Hunch, to eBay for $80 million.

A couple years before that, he sold another startup he founded, SiteAdvisor, to McAfee for a rumored price of $75 million.

Now he's working for eBay and doing a lot of investing in startups, too.

Yesterday, Dixon published a post on "some things I’ve learned about the acquisition process over the years." It contains 14 lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs.

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Samsung: We're Not Interested in Buying RIM, or BlackBerry Licenses

via gizmodo.com

On the heels of last week's news suggesting that RIM was planning to license out its new operating system, BB10, Samsung has firmly denied any desires to become involved with RIM.

Reuters is reporting that Samsung has told it outright that it "has not considered acquiring Research In Motion or licensing the... new mobile operating system."

Yesterday, shares of RIM rose 5 percent when an analyst predicted that Samsung might be interested in licensing BB10 from RIM. They look set to drop just as quickly.

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Tech acquisitions so far in 2012

via techi.com

Big fish eat little fish. It’s the way of the business world. Sometimes, it’s a welcomed meal for the “eaten” when a larger company gives them a lot of money to get their assets and often their people as well such as with Microsoft’s purchase of Yammer. For others, it’s not quite as welcome. In the case of Digg, the company passed on a deal worth $80 million in 2011 only to be scrapped for parts by 3 bigger fish for a total of $16 million (and that number is a bit generous).

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What would Microsoft purchasing Yammer mean for its users?

via techi.com

It is being reported by numerous sources that Microsoft has acquired Yammer, the social networking service that exclusively caters to business users. While there is still a lot of speculation at this point, it is believed that the software giant acquired the company behind the service for more than $1 billion. Microsoft has not announced what it plans to do with Yammer, but here’s what the acquisition could mean for users.

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Facebook Told Me To Sell My Business To Them Or Be Destroyed, And I Said Stuff It

via businessinsider.com

An app developer named Dalton Caldwell has written an acerbic open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The letter is about how Caldwell was called into Facebook to meet with a group of executives, and how these executives told Caldwell that his startup was competitve with a Facebook product, and that he should therefore sell it to Facebook or face destruction.

Caldwell says he rejected the offer. "I was not interested in an acqui-hire."

"I said that if Facebook wanted to have a serious conversation about acquiring my team and product, I would entertain the idea. Otherwise, I had zero interest in seeing my product shut down and joining Facebook. I told your team I would rather reboot my company than go down that route."

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Google Just Bought Sparrow, One Of The Best iPhone Developers Out There

via businessinsider.com

Google has just acquired Sparrow, the team behind one of the most popular Mac and iPhone mail applications.

The five-person Sparrow team will join the Gmail team, according a blog post from CEO Dom Leca.

The Sparrow app is one of the most critically acclaimed iPhone apps out there. It's smart, move for Google to grab good design talent.

Interestingly, Sparrow only works on iOS and Mac. There is no Android Sparrow application.

Google's own attempt at a Gmail app for iPhone was a woeful dud. We expect the Gmail app to get better, if the Sparrow team will be working on it. Hopefully, the Sparrow app won't get worse.

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