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.
Fruugo Moves On - Merges With UK Based DTL
One of the most debated startups, and companies in Finland, Fruugo, has reached a significant milestone. It has purchased Directory Technologies Limited (DTL) with its own shares and will also issue longterm financing through a share issue to fuel further growth in its ambitious quest. The new company will continue to operate under the name Fruugo and will also be registered to Finland. I sat down with Juha Usva (Fruugo CEO), Risto Siilasmaa (largest shareholder in Fruugo) and Dominic Allonby (CEO of DTL) to talk about the deal.
Risto Siilasmaa gave me a brief mention of the developments in the recent months, leading up to the merger. He said that they did not agree on the deal over night as talks had been continuing on an on and off basis for a period of months with DTL about various issues, including the merger. In the recent weeks, mutual interests finally met over the issue and they decided to go ahead with the deal.
Stardoll Acquires Piczo - For Once The Right Way Round
Stardoll, the Swedish based paper doll community, has announced that it has acquired Piczo, a social networking site aimed at teenagers in a cash and shares takeover. Details of the merger are very limited, but according to a Times Online article Stardoll will become profitable with the takeover.
Stardoll currently has around 20 million unique visitors a month visiting the site and an annual turnover of above 10 million euros. The idea behind the merger, according to Times Online, is to bring more value for the advertisers - both sites share similar demographics and many users on Stardoll link to Piczo. A good position to start off with. An educated guess, looking at various sources online, would be that Stardoll has about three times the registered members of Piczo - 30 million and 10 million respectively.
From this point of view, it makes complete sense for Stardoll to acquire Piczo and grow its properties online. With the acquisition, Stardoll will become the single most largest network online to target teenager girls (about 75% of Piczo's users are teenage girls). What Stardoll is able to do with its network is tailor it further to the needs of the advertisers than other broader social network services like Facebook, for example, can. The reason is simple, the passion and niche goes a lot deeper in services such as Stardoll than it will in Facebook. With deeper integration into the service, Stardoll is able to charge higher premiums from the advertisers.
It's hard to say if the downturn in the economy had something to do with this merger, but my bet is that it happened exactly because of that. In general, it is said that valuations go down when the economy plummets. My guess is that Piczo has become an attractive opportunity for that reason. Stardoll has been very successful and has also been growing organically very strongly - thus showing fewer effects of the slowing economy.
Furthermore it is great to see a Nordic company takeover its competitor from the Valley - there haven't been too many of those around. However, it is hard to say how this merger will show to the users - if it will in any way other than similar kind of advertisement solutions. One thing is sure though, these sort of activities will create more interest towards entrepreneurship in general - exactly what we need more of here in the Nordics.
Icelandic Gaming Juggernaut CCP
Library House awarded the Icelandic gaming company CCP as one of the hottest mediatech companies most likely to change the media technology industry in the world. I decided to dig a little deeper into the company to see what they are up to. In short CCP is the developer and father of the MMORPG Eve Online.
Eve Online is a relatively old, but still some what popular, massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-game (or MMORPG). According to Compete.com, CCP gathers just under 100k unique visitors a month. You need a client to play the game and it costs 19,95€ a for a 30 day period. Eve Online has over 200 000 subscribers, and with some quick calculations that makes at least 4M € a month, if all the subscribers are paying members.
CCP is a relatively large Icelandic company that merged back in 2006 with White Wolf Publishing Inc to create the largest virtual gaming universe, at least this was the case back in 2006 when World of Warcraft wasn't quite as popular. White Wolf Publiching Inc was a popular published of offline role playing games and one of the reasons for the merger was to combine these talents into synergies that would yield better results both offline and online.
Furthermore the company has offices in UK, Iceland, US and a representative office in China. They also have more than 40 jobs open so they definitely see growth in this sector despite the downturn (according to Fox Business, they had more than 300 employees back in June).
