Fusion Corporate Partners

Groupon has acquired the Seattle-based portfolio company Pelago from Reliance Venture Asset Management. Pelago was founded by former senior executives of Amazon.com. Pelago had developed social-media and location-based mobile and web apps that allowed end users to share real time information about their favorite places and their business partners to offer incentives to customers for visiting them.

It was a stock-for-stock swap deal and the entire Pelago team will be joining Groupon. Groupon will integrate the backend technology which will provide a social media location based capabilities to their current group buying infrastructure. The acquisition will improve its offering to its end users by bringing them together with local discount offers.

“Reliance Venture has received a premium of 80 per cent and additionally expects to receive an additional return of 4x-5x on its original investment on its holding if Groupon IPO is priced at a valuation of $25 billion” said Harshal J Shah, CEO of Reliance Venture Asset Management. Hence the effective return is slated to be 7.2 – 9.0x of its original investment when Groupon shares list after its IPO on New York Stock exchange or NASDAQ.

Along with Reliance Venture Pelago was also invested into by Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO Amazon.com, Silicon Valley venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) — which also invested in Groupon last year. This was the first investment made by KPCB from their iFund, which funds ideas and products that build upon the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Other investors include T-Mobile Ventures and DAG Ventures.

Jeff Holden, CEO of Pelago, had earlier said, “We valued Reliance as a partner in the wireless space and the global potential they could bring to the company”. He also mentioned in a blogpost, “You would be right to expect that the ideas underpinning its and many of the inventions contained within may emerge under the Groupon banner”.

USA, Palo Alto, CA & USA, Seattle, WA

Related articles:

• Groupon completes a huge $950 million round of financing Posted on January 11, 2011
• Groupon rejects Google’s $6 billion offer Posted on December 7, 2010
• Has Google bought Groupon? Posted by Fusion DigiNet on November 30, 2010
• Groupon has acquired European competitor Citydeal Posted on May 18, 2010
• Groupon acquires mob.ly Posted on May 7, 2010
• Groupon raises more funds at a $1.2 million valuation Posted on April 18, 2010
• Groupon has raised a Series B financing round of $30 million December 2, 2009

eBay has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WHERE, a leading location media company and local discovery mobile application. WHERE is expected to enhance the company’s position in local and mobile commerce and deepen its ability to connect retailers with consumers.

Founded in 2004, WHERE is a Boston-based business at the forefront of the intersection of local and mobile commerce. WHERE operates a leading local mobile discovery application – WHERE – and a leading location-based advertising network – WHERE Ads. Through these services WHERE provides personalised, hyper-local advertising, offers, and deals to millions of mobile consumers across North America. More than 120,000 retailers, brands and small merchants use WHERE daily to reach new audiences and deliver real-time foot traffic to their doorstep.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011.

USA, San Jose, CA

Related articles:

• eBay to acquire shares in Turkey’s GittiGidiyor Posted on April 21, 2011
• eBay to acquire GSI Commerce for $2.4BN Posted onMarch 28, 2011
• eBay to acquire brands4friends for $200 million Posted on December 20, 201o
• eBay Acquires RedLaser (barcode-scanning application for iPhone) Posted on June 30, 2010
• eBay Inc. Completes Sale of Skype to investor group led by Silver Lake Posted on November 19, 2009

According to the WSJ, Twitter is in advanced talks to purchase Tweetdeck, for around $50 million. It was only in February that DigiNet reported hat UberMedia was in negotiations to buy Tweetdeck.

The acquisition is being attempted as Twitter aims to make its services easier for new users to navigate while also help more accustomed users find more relevant content.

Read the full story on WSJ

USA, San Francisco, CA & & UK, London

Related articles:

• UberMedia close to acquiring TweetDeck Posted on February 14, 2011
• Twitter has no plans to go public and the JP Morgan investment story is made up Posted on March 4, 2011

AFCV Holdings, LLC, a portfolio company of growth equity investor Summit Partners, has completed the acquisition of Answers.com

Answers.com common stockholders will receive $10.50 per share in cash. The holders of Answers.com’s Series A and Series B convertible preferred stock will receive cash consideration based on the number of the common stock into which those shares were convertible at the time of the merger.

As a result of the acquisition, Answers.com’s common stock has ceased trading on The NASDAQ Capital Market.

UBS Investment Bank has acted as exclusive financial advisor and Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel, LLC as legal advisor to Answers.com. Jefferies & Company, Inc. has served as financial advisor and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Professional Corporation as legal advisor to AFCV Holdings.

USA, New York, NY

Related article:

• Answers.com to be acquired for $127 million in cash: $10.50 per share Posted on February 4, 2011

Forum communities business CrowdGather has acquired the assets of free forum hosting business, Forumer.com. Forumer, which serves 35 million monthly pageviews across 200,000 active forums, joins CrowdGather’s existing free forum hosting platforms FreeForums.org and Lefora.com in providing a wide range of alternatives to individuals seeking to build communities online. With this purchase, CrowdGather’s network traffic has increased 50% this year to 135 million monthly pageviews and 13 million monthly unique visitors. This is up from 100 million monthly pageviews just prior to the transaction and 90 million monthly pageviews at the beginning of calendar 2011.

“In operation since 2003, Forumer has had a long history as a destination for forum builders,” said Sanjay Sabnani, CrowdGather’s Chairman and CEO. “We are excited to welcome them to the CrowdGather family. Consolidation is taking place at a rapid place on the Internet and forums are no different. We believe that we are building a strong foundation, one which will allow us to become the Company of choice when a forum owner decides to ultimately sell his or her community.”

USA. Woodland Hills, CA