Google acquires Wavii for $30M

April 23, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

waviiGoogle Inc has acquired natural language processing startup Wavii for around $30 million in cash. Google outbid Apple who wanted the company for its voice-activated personal assistant Siri division.

It is only one month ago that Fusion DigiNet reported Yahoo had acquired mobile news aggregator Summly,  Wavii’s main competitor, for a similar amount.

The Wavii team, including founder Adrian Aoun, will  relocate to Google’s Knowledge Graph division Mountain View, California.google

USA, Mountain View, California & Seattle, WA

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LifeApps acquires Today’s New Deal

March 23, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

LifeApps-Icon-2012-85pxLifeApps Digital Media has acquired the assets of Today’s New Deal, including todaysnewdeal.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LifeApps Digital Media a designer of apps for sports, health, fitness and entertainment enthusiasts, has acquired Today’s New Deal, a Southern California based daily deal website and email marketing newsletter service. LifeApps has acquired all assets of the Today’s New Deal website, newsletter system and Today’s New Deal’s approximately 40,000 registered users.

“We are looking forward to branding Today’s New Deal as a sports, health and fitness specific daily deals site combined with an m-Commerce mobile app companion,” said LifeApps CEO, Robert Gayman. “The Southern California region, from Ventura County through Los Angeles and San Diego, is a very health conscious, e-commerce and mobile health friendly area. We know that the sports, health and fitness targeted daily deals that Today’s New Deal will be delivering are going to be of great interest to the approximately 40,000 existing subscribers of Today’s New Deal. We also believe narrowing the focus of the deals to our specific sports, health and fitness market will help us improve the deals that are offered through Today’s New Deal and grow its subscriber base.”

LifeApps will brand the Today’s New Deal service with a new look, new logo and a companion m-Commerce mobile app and will launch the new service this summer.

USA, San Diego, CA

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Oil Price Information Service acquires mobile app and website GasBuddy

March 5, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

opisPetroleum pricing and news information business Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) has acquired mobile app and website GasBuddy. OPIS is a wholly owned subsidiary of UCG. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

OPIS and GasBuddy are long-term data partners, together producing the a real-time database of retail fuel prices at over 130,000 gasstations and convenience stores in the US and Canada. gasbuddy_logo

“Through our combined resources, consumers will have the very best retail fuel prices, tools and information to save money at the pump,” said OPIS CEO Brian Crotty. “I look forward to working shoulder-to-shoulder with Dustin Coupal and Jason Toews, co-founders of GasBuddy, and their talented staff,” he added.

OPIS say they will accelerate investment in GasBuddy’s “OpenStore” software, which enables convenience stores to reach their customers with highly targeted value offerings.

USA, Gaithersburg, MD & Brooklyn Park, MN

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Yahoo! acquires mobile app creator Alike

February 13, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

YahooYahoo! has acquired Alike, a mobile app that helps people find nearby restaurants and places they’ll like. Alike makes money through affiliate partnerships with third-party providers that aggregate deals for local venues.

Here is how Alike announced the acquisition.

At Alike, we’ve spent the last couple of years working hard to build amazing mobile experiences to delight our customers, which is alike_logo_coral-4fdb275b8fa65a199fecac60239886c7why we’re thrilled to announce some big news: we’re joining Yahoo! Mobile.

We’ve always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences. We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives.

In Yahoo! we’ve found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real. We’re super excited to join Yahoo!’s mobile team, where we can march toward that vision faster than ever.

As of today, we will no longer support the Alike Nearby iPhone and Web apps. Thank you to all our customers, partners, investors, and advisors who’ve supported us from day one! We’ve taken a big step on our journey, and we could not have done it without your support.

Looking forward to starting our new chapter at Yahoo!

USA, Sunnydale, CA

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Go Daddy acquires M.dot

February 12, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

mdotWeb hosting business Go Daddy, has acquired M.dot, a mobile app for small business website creation and management. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The M.dot app offers mobile website creation based on pre-loaded templates with easy-to-use custom features, such as store location, driving directions, tap-to-call, galleries, business hours and price lists, all in a user-interface designed for mobile device screens. It also includes a blog feature, which allows users to write and insert photos and video with rich text capabilities. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Dropbox.

“We’re pleased to welcome M.dot to our growing Go Daddy family,” said Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving, “M.dot’s global vision of a mobile future for small businesses fits beautifully with what our customers need right now.

M.dot was founded by Dominik Balogh and Pavel Serbajlo in June 2012. They have the backing of leading Silicon Valley investors including Floodgate, SV Angel and Archimedes Labs. The company will operate from Go Daddy’s Silicon Valley office.

USA, Sunnyvale, CA

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OpenTable acquires Foodspotting app

January 29, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

OPENTABLE, INC. LOGOOpenTable, the online restaurant company, is to acquire Foodspotting, an app for finding and sharing dishes at restaurants, for approximately $10 million in cash pursuant to a stock purchase agreement.

Matt Roberts , Chief Executive Officer of OpenTable, said, “The Foodspotting team is as passionate about dining as we are, and we’re looking forward to leveraging their unique expertise in the areas of imagery and social sharing to enrich the OpenTable experience for diners and restaurants in new and exciting ways. By adding more visually compelling content to help people decide where to dine and discover dishes they’ll love, we hope to make it even easier to find the perfect table for any occasion.”

USA, San Francisco, CA

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Performance Marketing Brands acquires Pushpins

January 24, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

pmbUS shopping programs business Performance Marketing Brands has acquired Pushpins. Pushpins is a free iOS application that offers grocery shoppers digital coupons at over 6,000 stores and weekly specials at over 50,000 stores, as well as easy access to nutritional information and an intelligent shopping assistant.

Pushpins’ technology integrates with customer loyalty cards, so coupons get automatically deducted during grocery store purchases at the checkout. pushpins

“Expanding into grocery categories is a great way for us to expand opportunities for our members to save with coupons, deals and cash back every time they shop,” said Kevin H. Johnson, CEO of Performance Marketing Brands. “The Pushpins application provides a wonderful tool for consumers to shop smarter.”

Pushpins was founded in 2010 by Co-Founders Jason Gurwin, CEO, and Peter Michailidis, CMO. The two entrepreneurs previously built entertainment and point-of-sale systems

USA, San Francisco, CA & Palo Alto, CA

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InMobi acquires Overlay Media

January 9, 2013 — Fusion DigiNet

inmobiIndependent mobile advertising network InMobi has acquired Overlay Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Overlay Media is a developer of mobile data analytics based technologies. The company’s flagship product, the Context Engine, enables intelligent on-device behaviour, wiser use of battery power and increased personalisation.

Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO at InMobi said, “We are excited to add amazing talent to InMobi. This overlaylogoacquisition, along with Metaflow Solutions and MMTG Labs, will help us to continue to be at the forefront of delivering highly engaging content to consumers globally.”

The Overlay Media team will be based from the InMobi London EMEA HQ.

Singapore & UK, London

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Viggle to acquire GetGlue for $25M cash and 48.3M shares

November 19, 2012 — Fusion DigiNet

Viggle Inc., the television loyalty service, is to acquire GetGlue, the social TV app. Viggle will pay $25 million in cash and 48.3 million shares of stock for GetGlue. Viggle Inc. will operate the Viggle and GetGlue brands, and GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold will join Viggle Inc. in a senior executive position on its management team and as a member of its Board of Directors. Viggle will also absorb all 34 GetGlue employees.

Robert F.X. Sillerman, Executive Chairman and CEO of Viggle said,“With this deal, we are combining very experienced and creative product, engineering and management teams that will continue to build great user experiences and provide industry leading platforms for consumers, networks and advertisers. “We will also be vastly increasing the Viggle user base and quadrupling our network partnerships. Viggle and GetGlue users can look forward to using the apps they have come to love as we add new and appealing features made possible by the combined resources of this clear industry leader.”

Founded in 2007, New York City-based GetGlue has than 3.2 million registered users as well as a database with more than 500 million entertainment ratings and check-ins. GetGlueHD provides customers with a TV guide for the mobile era, listing both TV and online content in calendar form.

Today’s deal is another in a series of recent acquisitions by companies run by Sillerman. In the past five months, Sillerman’s SFX Entertainment bought two Electronic Dance Music companies – Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color, (formerly Dayglow).

USA, New York

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HotelTonight acquires PrimaTable; Brings on All-Star Team to Drive Product Strategy

October 16, 2012 — Fusion DigiNet

HotelTonight, the last-minute hotel booking app, has made its first acquisition. It has acquired San Francisco-based restaurant reservation start-up PrimaTable. Launched in December 2010, HotelTonight has so far raised $35.7 million. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

PrimaTable has built a sophisticated platform to help restaurants optimise revenue and better manage their scarce table resources. HotelTonight will be incorporating this platform into its own yield management system, presently targeted at top quality hotels.

Jamie Davidson, Co-Founder and CEO of PrimaTable, will join HotelTonight as Vice President of Product. Colin Zima, Co-Founder of PrimaTable, will join as Data Scientist.

Sam Shank, Co-Founder and CEO, HotelTonight said, “We’re thrilled to be working with the PrimaTable team to continue to make booking a hotel room at the last-minute a seamless and magical process for consumers, and a windfall for hotels. When we look to acquire companies we look first and foremost at the talent. It’s clear that we struck gold with the PrimaTable team — not only are they brilliant, they also have more experience solving these problems than practically anyone else in the world.”

USA, San Francisco, CA

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