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Posts Tagged ‘deal’

After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer.

I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.

Evri, on the other hand, has been focusing more on filtering the realtime Web and then creating a semantic index of those pages based on matching similar content. One of the big drivers of the deal was the promise of combining Evri’s realtime filtering with T2, which is ideal for more evergreen and authoritative content.

“We had to find a home,” explains Radar CEO Nova Spivack. “Fortunately, we had T2 and a portfolio of fundamentally valuable IP. And user growth is holding steady even though we are no longer working on Twine” He also confirmed that he was “in discussions” with larger companies. Why did he choose Evri? “At the end of the day, not only was it a better offer, but Evri is more compatible with our team. Joining one of the larger players was a possibility, but it meant we would not get to work on T2.” Spivack will be an advisor to the combined company. He wrote a blog post about the deal.

Semantic search is still in its infancy. Consolidation among startups could give the acquirers more firepower, but eventually the bigger search engines are going to start getting serious.

This $70 Casio Exilim is purple but it’s priced at over $100 just about everywhere else, so let’s just go with it. It looks more pink to me, but Woot says it’s purple and who am I to question Woot?

See more here:
Woot! Casio Exilim EX-S5PE for $70

hi5, one of the world’s most popular social networks, has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. Today, the company is furthering this strategy with the acquisition of social gaming developer Big Six. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. See the full release below.

Big Six’s founders, Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, will join the hi5 management team. Hi5 says the deal will boost the social networks efforts in developing in commerce platforms and payment processing offerings. Right now, gaming is a central part of hi5’s strategy for growth so it makes sens for the social network to acquire innovative technologies and talent. The games section of hi5’s site accounts for around 1/3 of the site’s traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5’s revenue.

Apart from the currency and payments technology, Big Six’s social gaming platform will also become part of hi5. With the massive success of Zynga and Playfish, it makes sense that hi5 would try to create a social network that centers around gaming itself. hi5 has over 60 million members, which is a far cry from Facebook’s 400 million users.

In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.

hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced the acquisition of social gaming company Big Six. The Austin-based company was founded by gaming veterans Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, all of whom will join the hi5 management team, as announced separately today.

The deal enhances hi5’s growing leadership in commerce for virtual goods and games. Building on hi5’s current commerce platform, which includes a global virtual currency called hi5 Coins, support for over 60 payment methods worldwide, and new advertising-based transactional capabilities – the Big Six acquisition brings significant new technology and software platforms in the areas of payment processing, fraud detection and conversion optimization. In addition to its proprietary commerce platform, Big Six also designed a social gaming platform which will become part of the core hi5 site.

“The Big Six team and technology are a perfect complement to what we have already developed at hi5,” said Bill Gossman, CEO of hi5. “Over the last two years, we have made a substantial investment in building out the industry’s most robust commerce infrastructure for virtual goods and gaming and this acquisition will considerably augment both our commerce platform and domain expertise.”

“We are excited to be joining a company that shares our philosophy and vision for how social gaming will evolve,” said Kevin Gliner, co-founder and CEO, Big Six. “This deal is a perfect match because it enables us to accelerate our go-to-market plans by leveraging hi5’s huge global audience.”

Startup MoLo Rewards is a mobile software that allows you to scan your phone at the point of sale to automatically redeem all your coupons or loyalty rewards using the company’s Near Field Communication (NFC) or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Today, the startup is launching time-sensitive deals for 50 percent or greater in savings at local businesses and retailers to promote the adoption of the company’s point of sale technology. MoLo Rewards has launched its deals in San Diego and Toronto, and expects to expand into three more cities by the end of the year.

Similar to the model that is currently used by Groupon, MoLo Rewards showcases one deal per city and shoppers then have a limited period of time to purchase the deal. Each deal must be sold to a minimum number of people in order for the deal to “on.”

MoLo Rewards’ branded RFID tag allows users to redeem their coupons from their mobile phones at the point of sale and requires RFID equipped terminals in store. So far, only 150,000 businesses are equipped with RFID terminals. Once the transaction is complete MoLo Rewards issues loyalty rewards which accrue allowing for the end user to obtain various goods and or services. And MoLo Rewards also provides loyalty points to users for every dollar they spend which can in turn be used for tangible “rewards” such as a flat screen TV or

The key to MoLo Rewards is the ability to completely eliminate paper, SMS, bar codes or other clumsy coupon solutions. A graduate of the Founder Institute, MoLo Rewards presented at the DEMO conference last fall. In terms of the group-buying side of things, MoLo will face competition from Groupon, LivingSocial, and the many other identical collective buying sites that have popped up recently to serve local deals to consumers. Molo’s advantage is its mobile access and portability but it is only a matter of time before other collective buying sites develop mobile technologies and apps to equip consumers with coupons on the go.

Disclosure: My husband, Suneel Gupta, is an employee of Groupon.

During today’s AOL earnings call, which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search share in the U.S.

But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing.  Microsoft can throw all the money it wants at AOL on the search side, it probably won’t make a difference. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes:

On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have a long partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.

So he is not ruling out Bing entirely, but if you read between the lines it is clear that he values Google almost as much as a distribution partner as he does as a search partner. Add in the fact that he still seems to be on good terms with his former boss Eric Schmidt, and it is clear that he is leaning heavily towards sticking with Google.

Oh, by the way, this also means that he’s fine with Google being a huge news aggregator, because those links are extremely valuable and he understands that better than the CEOs of most other media companies. Google’s unique position as a source of traffic to Websites is one of its great strengths in any negotiation involving another Web company. I’ve heard this before from other Web CEOs who let Google get away with a better deal than they would otherwise because they fear reprisals in the form of lower search traffic. Google, of course, needs to keep up appearances that it delivers the best search results no matter what, but there are other ways Google can help juice a site’s traffic.

Update: As I was writing this post, Tim Armstrong called me. He emphasized that “Overall, we do feel distribution is important, we also like revenue. We will balance those things.” It all “comes down to what the actual distribution deal is.” In other words, he is still negotiating.

But he did shed some light on how a distribution deal could work. “You can’t really affect the index in partnership deals,” he explains, but there are lots of other things AOL and Google coudl do. On AOL’s end, it could change the way pages are set up and how much advertising is on each page to make them appear in results better. On Google’s end, there are opportunities to get more traffic “through Oneboxes and other types of integration like on the News property.” (The Onebox is Google’s unified results at the top of organic search which pulls from different sources). Another possibility is to include search advertising inventory into the deal. So Armstrong is definitely thinking creatively about how to get the most out of his next search deal.

We recently wrote about ad-sponsored digital music download service FreeAllMusic.com’s deal with Universal Music to let anyone download music from the record label’s artists, which include Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Jay Sean. Today, the startup is announcing its another deal with a major record label: EMI Music.

Via FreeAllMusic’s platform, thousands of tracks will be offered at a rate of 20 free downloads per month, five per week, starting every Tuesday. The recently launched FreeAllMusic.com, which is in private beta, lets users access downloadable, high-quality, iPod-compatible MP3s of advertiser-paid, free, legal, and unrestricted song. The catch: users watch a video commercial per download on the site and users’ music selections and sponsoring brands are then promoted externally through an opt-in, digital advertising network.

To download a free track, users can select a participating brand and then need to watch a video advertisement from that brand. Brands who are participating in the initial launch are Coca-Cola, Warner Bros, Zappos, Lionsgate, LG, and others.

Similar to Universal Music, EMI Music has been a little lawsuit-happy when it comes to the dissemination of its content, which makes these deals surprising. But with the ad-supported downloads, FreeAllMusic may have found a way around music labels’ onerous fees. And the record labels get paid, which makes them happy with the deal. Music startup Groovershark also managed to slip past EMI’s lawyers to strike a deal last fall. According to a New York Times article from December, FreeAllMusic had already signed on another record label but declined to name the new label.

Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars.

The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition.

Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.

So what made the deal go sideways? We’re working on that. From the information we’ve gathered, there is currently no other suitor seriously looking at the company. For now Yelp intends to stay independent. We’re betting that someone – Apple, Microsoft, etc. – came to Yelp with an offer for a strategic deal gave Stoppleman the confidence to say no to Google. But who that partner is and what they offered isn’t something we’ve been able to track down.

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Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million.

Yelp was founded in 2004 as a way to let users leave reviews on local businesses. Comscore puts worldwide traffic at nearly 9 million monthly unique visitors, and it has been growing fast – the company says it’s real numbers are more like 25 million monthly uniques.

Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million and are expecting $50 million or so in 2010.

Yelp last raised venture capital in early 2008 from DAG at a $200 million pre-money valuation, we’ve heard. They’ve raised a total of $31 million over four venture rounds.

On the odds of the deal happening – one source says its 80% likely. Not signed, sealed and delivered, but past the term sheet stage.

Google is building out their own directory of local businesses with its Place Pages, which can be accessed via Google Maps and local search. They are encouraging local businesses to put Google-branded stickers in store windows and recently added their own ratings summaries to business profiles. Yelp, of course, already has all of this data, along with a growing and active audience of consumers who are used to finding (and rating) businesses on Yelp.

For their part, Google is clearly on a shopping spree. They recently acquired AdMob for $750 million, and were in the running on the LaLa acquisition. Expect lots of deals to be announced by them over the next three months.

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Go ahead and file this deal under “aggressive” as Woot.com is selling the Gevalia G90 coffee maker for just $10 plus $5 shipping. This is a pod-style coffee maker – easy cleanup, quick brew time – that normally sells elsewhere for $35 and up

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Woot! Gevalia G90 coffee maker for $10

“Realtime” is the hot buzzword right now, and today Google and MySpace are set to further it along with a new agreement that will see Google serve up search results from MySpace in realtime. What these means is that all publicly available data that’s on MySpace will be available to Google within seconds, we’ve learned. This will include not only status updates, but also elements like pictures and blog posts as well, apparently.

And this data won’t just be available to Google, but anyone using the MySpace Developer Platform. But Google is the first, and obviously largest, partner to implement this. For Google, this deal comes at a time shortly after they announced a partnership with Twitter to pull in tweet data as well. Meanwhile, rival Microsoft was able to secure deals with Twitter and Facebook for Bing.

Google clearly wants access to any kind of data it can get its hands on, so this MySpace deal is another good move for them. However, since MySpace has been eclipsed by Facebook as the largest social network, Bing’s Facebook data will likely be more valuable from a searching perspective.

For MySpace, this comes at a time when rumors are swirling that they might integrate Facebook Connect on their site in a major way — a bold move, obviously. It’s not clear how something like that would affect the data being pushed to Google with this new deal. MySpace also recently synced up its status updates with Twitter.

This deal is also interesting considering the Google’s search deal with MySpace, a nice chunk of revenue for the company, is set to expire next year. MySpace hasn’t said much on the deal, but new CEO Owen Van Natta has noted that losing one deal wouldn’t make or break the company.

This new feature is expected to be demoed at Google’s Search event today. You can find our live notes for that here.

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