News Publisher Schibsted Set To Buy Aspiro
The Scandinavian news publisher Schibsted is set to buy a Norwegian company, Aspiro, for 340 million Swedish krona (€38m). Aspiro provides whitelabel TV and music streaming services, and also provides the music streaming service WiMP, which competes with Spotify. Aspiro is traded on the Nasdaq OMX Nordic Exchange in Stockholm, and Schibsted Media Group offers to the shareholders in Aspiro AB to acquire all the shares in Aspiro for SEK 1.65 in cash per share.
Eat.fi Acquired By MTV Media
Eat.fi, the Finnish restaurant search and review site, was acquired by MTV Media on Monday. MTV, one of the largest media corporations in Finland, plans to combine Eat.fi with its own food related site, Makuja, in hopes of building the leading online food and restaurant service in Finland.
Rumor has it that Eat.fi was in acquisition talks with an unnamed Finnish media company already in 2009, but the deal reportedly fell through due to differences in Eat.fi's valuation. No figures were disclosed on yesterday’s deal.
RedLynx Acquired By Ubisoft
Here's another nice acquisition of a Finnish game company. Yesterday Ubisoft anounced it had acquired RedLynx Games, creator of the the popular "Trials" game that blew up on Xbox Live. The game has now become one of the best-selling games ever on Xbox LIVE Arcade, with over two million paid downloads for the main game and its downloadable content.
AMSC's Finances Turns Off Acquisition Of The Switch
As a quick followup, The Switch, a windmill component engineering firm, is no longer being acquired by American Superconductor Corp. When the acquisition was announced last March we called The Switch "the next success story Finland has been waiting for," but yesterday The Switch shareholders and AMSC announced that they have agreed to terminate the acquisition agreement, due to adverse market conditions for the financing required to fund the acquisition. According to Bloomberg, AMSC has dropped 82 percent since April 5, when its largest customer, Chinese wind-turbine maker Sinovel Wind Group Co., refused to accept contracted shipments.
Sony Buys Out Remainder Of Ericsson
Sony annouonced it is taking over the Sony Ericsson mobile phone joint venture by buying out the remaining shares of the Swedish manufacturer for 1.05 billion euros. The handset maker will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corp. This move is seen as a play by Sony to take further unify its games and hardware with its handsets, which have been kept seperate since Sony's 2001 takeover of Ericsson.
Fromdistance Acquired By U.S. Based Numara Software
The Finnish/Estonian mobile device management service, Fromdistance, was acquired on Tuesday by Tampa, Florida based Numara Software. Fromdistance was founded in 2004 and is located in Tallinn, Estonia.
Fromdistance's mobile device management software offers the ability for a company's IT to manage a fleet of wireless devices using a standard browser interface. And as the name implies, Fromdistance allows this software management to take place remotely with no physical contact. The service has been gaining popularity among IT professionals, and is even used to manage the Finnish Parliaments' range of Nokia phones for installation and application management purposes.
Norway's QuestBack Acquires Globalpark
QuestBack AS, the leading European provider of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) services has announced the acquisition and merger of a German originated company Globalpark. Globalpark was founded in 1999 and has grown quite rapidly. At the moment of the acquisition, the company has also high profile clients such as Continental, Daimler, Nintendo, Sony Music and Bosch to name a few. Questback has been acquiring companies in Europe at an increasing pace in the last few years.
Link: Can You Name A Startup That Got Better After Being Acquired?
Nathan Bowers states quite a controversial statement in his post from last year: "Can you name a web startup that got better after it was acquired?". He says he can't and gives a few examples.
Feedburner: Google folded them into their own login scheme. Google added crummy ad options to feeds. Otherwise the product is stuck. Feels undead.What they should be working on: improving the display of RSS feeds, making RSS feel more like a human connection between publisher and reader, fixing the fact that when you put an RSS button on your site it’s a dumb, non-stateful button (compare RSS buttons to Tumblr or Twitter follow functionality).
Arbitron Acquires Zokem For $11.7M In Cash
News just out regarding Zokem, the Finnish mobile analytics company, has been acquired by Arbitron a NYSE listed public company for $11.7M in cash. Zokem is a provider of custom and syndicated mobile research panels, plug-and-play mobile media measurement tools and software building blocks for mobile device tracking. Arbitron Inc. is an international media and marketing research firm working in the radio, television, cable and mobile industries together with advertising agencies and advertisers around the world. Arbitron's market cap by today's closing price is a little over $1 billion.
Rovio: We're In Acquisition Mode
Rovio's Mighty Eagle, Peter Vesterbacka stated this morning in the Summer of Startups press event that "Rovio is very much in acquisition mode at the moment". Last week we wrote about Rovio acquiring a Helsinki based animation studio Kombo for an undisclosed amount. Vesterbacka stated that the acquisition was not a huge one, but they still added 20 people to Rovio's headcount making the company now 120 employees strong.
Microsoft Acquires Skype For $8.5B: The Who Takes What Of The Deal
It couldn’t have come at a better time than this. We had been anticipating the official word on the Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype since early morning and word has been rolled out that the acquisition has been finalized and done with. The rumored buyout price was $7 Billion and the tech community across the globe thought it was far fetched. Here’s a shocker; Microsoft paid a healthy $8.5B for its acquisition of Skype, giving it a total control of the company, even the $686M debt on it.
Microsoft, Not Facebook Or Google, To Acquire Skype For $7B
We reported a few days back regarding the possibility of the VoIP service, Skype being acquired by either Facebook or Google. While that rumor was still blazing across the Web new rumors add up, with the latest hinting at Microsoft being a very strong contender in the race to acquire Skype.
American Superconductor Acquires The Switch For 190M Euros
While we've cut down on the cleantech reporting, this one's a winner that deserves to be written about: American Superconductor has acquired The Switch Engineering for 190 million euros. We've previously written about The Switch as being one of the most potential cleantech companies coming out from Finland. They create generator and converter packages for the wind energy industry. Back in April 2010 we wrote that Switch is the next success story Finland has been looking for - it seems we were quite right with that statement.
Disney Acquires Finnish Rocket Pack
Disney's Matthew Grossman has confirmed to Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that they have acquired the Finnish gaming company Rocket Pack. There was no confirmation or disclosure of any other details of the deal. First rumours of this began to surface last night on Twitter, but they were hard to confirm. The company was acquired relatively quickly, just a year from its founding.
Oskari Lehtonen On The Offerium Acquisition
Last week we broke the news that Sanoma had acquired the Finnish based coupon site Offerium. We promised to dig a little deeper into this and see what the motives and actual tricks of trade behind the deal were. Oskari Lehtonen was one of the co-founders of the company and we turned to him with a few questions about the acquisition itself.
Yandex Supports Startups
As of this summer, Yandex launched a programme to support Russian start-ups called Yandex Start. The project selects the most promising companies in the region for a one-day seminar to look for possible cooperation and acquisition. Successful applicants receive Yandex's technologies (as APIs), computing facilities and expert advice. Two Yandex.Start sessions were held last year in September and December and as a result Yandex acquired two start-ups WebVisor and Loginza. WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) that will now be integrated with Yandex's own analytics tool, Yandex.Metrica. The company was founded in 2008 by a small team of entrepreneurs from Moscow.
Sanoma News Acquires Offerium
It seems that the coupon site sales have started in the Nordics. Some time ago Schibsted purchased 37,5% share of Letsdeal.se and now Sanoma News acquires a Finnish contender Offerium. Sanoma News CEO Pekka Soini stated that coupon sales online, through such services as Offerium, is currently one of the fastest growing online segments. Sanoma News wants a piece of that pie. The disclosure came through Sanoma News' press release.
Skype Introduces Group Video Calling, Keen At Acquiring Qik
There are mixed reports on the communication platform provider, Skype showing willingness to acquire Qik, the video streaming service for an undisclosed amount. The indications of this first sprung when Skype’s CEO, Tony Bates agreed on Skype having intentions to do so. Though the price is undisclosed, it is reported to be in the $100 Million range with the deal expected to close by the end of January.
Schibsted Buys A Large Share Of Let's Deal
Back in December, Schibsted announced that it has acquired 37,5% of the Swedish Letsdeal.se website. We had a chance to get a few comments from Alexander Hars, the CEO of the company about the deal and what this may mean for letsdeal.se. Schibsted is one of the largest online media groups in the Nordics and thus, this kind of a deal is significant to say the least.
Danish YouCalc Acquired By SuccessFactors
Back in June 2009 we had YouCalc pitch at our Copenhagen event about their service and only a little over a year later they've been acquired by US based SuccessFactors. The deal was disclosed yesterday in a number of sites, such as RWW. YouCalc is a service that helps you get more out of your data in the different services out there. They've built an application that can pull data from different applications, and not only show it to you from different points of view, but also mash the data up to understand correlations.
Norwegians Are On A Shopping Spree - QuestBack Acquires Digium
Norwegian enterprise feedback management company QuestBack has just announced that they have acquired the Finnish SaaS company Digium Oy. Digium is perhaps the most well known company in this sector in Finland has proven that in their financials as well. In the financial year ending 2009, they turned over about 4 million euros while making over 650k€ in profit. In 2005 they made just about a million in revenue. The new company expects to tally a combined turnover of more than 22 MEUR for 2010. This makes it the largest player in the EFM industry in Europe.
QuestBack has been on a shopping spree lately. They have acquired Easyresearch AB from Sweden and Refleks AS from Norway. Both companies have been integrated fully to QuestBack's operations and thus adding to their turnover in a successful manner.
Photo Sharing Acquisitions - Kuvat.fi Buys Fotopankki.fi
Mediadrive Oy, the company behind Kuvat.fi, the largest Finnish-based photo sharing site has acquired Fotopankki.fi from Vendep. Fotopankki.fi, which was earlier part of the popular Finnish portal site Plaza.fi will be integrated into Kuvat.fi immediately. This isn't the only acquisition carried through by Kuvat.fi. Earlier this year they acquired Kuvaboxi from MTV Media.
Is Apple Buying Polar Rose?
Is Apple about to buy the Sweden based Polar Rose? It seems so if there's any believing in the new released earlier today by Computer Sweden. Polar Rose is developing solutions in the area of computer vision technology.
Short Note on Liquidation Preferences
There's an interesting TechCrunch post a while back on the amount of money different people made on the Google acquisition of Slide. Slide was the maker of different Facebook applications, perhaps best known for its Funwall before Facebook took over those features and made the service redundant. The reason the post is interesting is the fact that it shows how different investors get their returns in a case where the valuation is only 36% of what it was 2 years ago.
Gemalto Acquires Valimo Wireless For Undisclosed Sum
Gemalto, provider of end-to-end security solutions, has acquired a Finnish startup Valimo Wireless. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Some of Valimo's investors included Altine Group, Risto Siilasmaa and SpringBank TechVentures.
Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!
Linden Lab Acquires Avatars United
The company behind Second Life, Linden Lab, has just announced it has bought Avatars United, a Stockholm Sweden online community for avatars (see our previous story here and here).
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon tells that when they talk to the users who sign up but then decide not to stay, they say they left, in part, because they had a hard time finding people to hang out with. Either their friends weren't there, or they have a hard time meeting new ones inworld, or sometimes both. Now Avatars United should fix this. I haven't looked at Second Life in a while, but if its anything like it has been before, I think Linden Lab needs much more than just Avatars United to make it work.
Investments And Acquisitions You Did Not Know About
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world's largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we're hearing from the street.
Nokia Looking To Unload Dopplr?
TechCrunch has heard that Nokia is looking to sell off Dopplr, a company they acquired less than a month ago. If this is indeed true, I wouldn't want to be a Nokia shareholder. In essence, Nokia paid for recruiting Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr CEO (former Nokia) as well as Matt Biddulph, Dopplr CTO. The reason I wouldn't want to be a shareholder is that paying for these kind of recruitment fees isn't the smartest path down the road to gather a winning team of professionals.
We also heard that there isn't a lot of synergies regarding the product roadmaps of Ovi and Dopplr, as they were mainly after the team behind Dopplr. This again raises an interesting point, would you as an entrepreneur sell your company at any cost and whatever the future may look like for your beloved one?
Mindtrek's First Day - Full Of Variety
Check, check... mike working, reporting from the Mindtrek conference from Tampere where some 800 people are networking, discussing internet and digital media at large. The day has been action packed and there has been a lot of different content to consume. Furthermore, the audience saw some top notch speakers at Mindtrek this year, especially Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström, who were keynote speakers continuing on the post they wrote for ArcticStartup earlier.
The day began with a keynote by Chris Messina. He talked about identity as a platform. Judging on the amount of comments from people on the aisles in the conference, Chris hit top on with his presentation. Although there were some illogicalities, which he admits, it's always great to hear news from The Valley on the trends that are pumping there.
Nokia Acquires Dopplr (This Time For Real!)
Marko Ahtisaari, the CEO of Dopplr, has just posted a blog post on the Dopplr Blog that Nokia indeed has acquired the company. Furthermore, Nokia has confirmed this with their own press release. Last week we quoted on ArcticStartup a rumour originating from Techcrunch that Nokia has acquired them. This stirred up a lot of publicity and since no party confirmed the rumour and one of the co-founders stated the deal was fabricated - we were under mixed messages and were unable to decide which side is right.
