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Facebook acquisition

Facebook Acquires Snaptu For An Estimated $60 – $70 Million

March 20, 2011

Snaptu logo Facebook Acquires Snaptu For An Estimated $60 $70 MillionFacebook reportedly acquired Snaptu for an estimated $60 – $70 million.

If you remember, it was Snaptuthat launched an app for smartphone-like usabilities on feature phones.

Snaptu is start-up founded in 2007 with offices in Tel Aviv, London, Silicon Valley and Melbourne.

The acquisition has been confirmed and is apparently expected to close in a couple of weeks. According to a post on Snaptu’s blog:

Earlier this year, we announced the launch of a new Facebook mobile application to give people a great mobile experience on a broad range of feature phones. The Facebook for Feature Phones app currently works on more than 2,500 devices.

We soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development. And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.

This is Facebook’s first acquisition of an Israeli company.

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Facebook Buys Most Of Drop.io, Recruits Sam Lessin

October 30, 2010

In is run of buying and acquisition, Facebook purchased most of drop.io, an online content-sharing service.

Drop.io is an online service where users create a “drop” (file-sharing page), and share various files like documents, videos and other digital contents through it. Users can also set a time period on the existence of a particular drop, and permissions for who can view or alter the content, and share it in a variety of ways.

With the acquisition, the company will be shutting down the service. Users are no longer allowed to create new drops, and current users (both free and premium) are being asked to download all their files before December 15th after which they will be deleted.

Along with the acquisition of most of the company, Facebook have also taken in the chief executive Sam Lessin.

According to Venturebeat, the acquisition is more inclined towards acquiring new talent rather than new a technology.

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Facebook Acquires Chai Labs While Google Goes For Like.com

August 16, 2010

Things are really heating up between Google and Facebook,  both showing interest in acquiring search-related businesses.

Facebook’s latest acquisition is Chai Labs, reportedly for around $10 million.

This Mountain View, California-based start-up was founded by former Google (GooG) adsense exec Gokul Rajaram.

On its website, Chai Labs says that the company is able to “bring a unique blend of skills and perspectives which help us reinvent the way content is created, stored, and delivered, to drive user and revenue growth for our customers.” The website also says that it specializes in “Structured Content Extraction” and “Semantic Search Platform.”

The ability to help publishers create, store and deliver content is something that makes sense for Facebook, given the powerful social networking site has been trying to work with media companies rather than compete with them.

According to VentureBeat, it isn’t exactly clear why Facebook is buying Chai Labs, but many people thinks it is more of a talent-acquisition than Chai Labs’ technology.

Meanwhile, Google is in the final stages of acquiring Like.com for $100 million, according to TechCrunch citing multiple sources about the information.

Like.com started as Riya, a tool for organizing photos, in April 2006. It re-launched as Like.com in November 2006 as the first visual search engine for products.

The co-founder and CTO, Burak Goturk, is a specialist in computer vision technology is said to have filed for two-dozen facial-recognition patents.

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Facebook Goes Shopping: Buys 18 Key Patents

August 5, 2010

Facebook goes shopping again!!!

This time, according to a VentureBeat, Facebook acquired 18 key patents related to social networks from MOL Global.

Out of the 18 patents, seven were awarded to Friendster, while the remaining are still pending. The seven patents and eleven patent application is said to have been transfered on June 7.

According to VentureBeat, the patents include:

a “system and method for managing an online social network,” “feeding updates to landing pages of users of an online social network from external sources,” and a “system, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks,” among others. Together, they appear to give Facebook control over a substantial portfolio of intellectual property covering the basic operations of any social network.”

The overall deal, which included cash was valued at $40 million, reports GigaOm

The deal makes  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg undisputed king of social network, not only in terms of social service and users, but also in terms of intellectual properties.

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Facebook Hirings To Increase As Ad Use Grows

August 4, 2010

Brian Womack reports on Bloomberg that Facebook’s biggest advertisers boosted spending by at least 10 times in the past year and expects Facebook’s revenue to reach $1.4 billion in 2010.

Some advertisers’ spending even reached 20-fold according to Facebook Chief Operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

So far, Facebook has been acquiring start-ups to increase it’s talent pool.

Vaughan Smith, Facebook director of corporate development, said he plans to hire another corporate development executive, adding to the one person helping him secure deals presently.

It is worth mentioning that Facebook took Bret Taylor, who was recently appointed CTO, under it’s wings after Facebook bought FriendFeed for $50 million a last year. Facebook also acquired Octazen, SahreGrove, and Hot Potato, to name a few, this year alone.

“As we get bigger and our platform gets more stable, I fully expect that we will be doing more significant acquisitions. This is working for us, and it’s working for the people that we’re acquiring,” Smith told Bloomberg reporter.

Smith also said that Facebook intends to keep up its acquisition pace and also start making bigger acquisitions in the near future, potentially those companies focusing on virtual currencies, mobile social networking, and start-ups that can further boost its advertising effort.

With half a billion users worldwide, acquiring more talents to carter to the needs of it users while tapping into its strong user base to generate more revenue, Facebook is certainly heading towards the right direction.

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Facebook Expected To Join Mobile Location Service With Loopt

February 25, 2010

Facebook is said to be doing due diligence on the a potential deal with Loopt, a mobile social location service, according to Techcrunch.

Both the parties have not confirmed on this. Loopt is said to have refused to comment on this subject, while Facebook spokesperson is reported to have said: “As a practical matter, we don’t comment on rumor and speculation.”

It is evident that the potential deal is in its early stages, but we can bet that Facebook is at the least very interested in acquiring Loopt, or perhaps a location-based service like it.

Till date Facebook have sat on the sidelines and ignored location features and the ever-increasing popularity of checking-in at locations via mobile devices. This hesitation maybe due to the privacy concerns around disclosing location information.

Location-aware services are immensely popular and has become a social trend almost in parallel to the popularity of social networking. So far, startups like Loopt, Foursquare, Gowalla, aka-aki and hundreds of little-known players are dominating this field. Recently launched Google Buzz also allows check-ins of locations via a mobile device.

With mobile location-based services expected to generate almost $13 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research, and the pace at which its popularity is rising and Facebook, with a user base of over 100 million mobile users, must should definitely want their share of the pie. Once can also suggest the move as a catch-up game with Google.

However, Facebook’s presence in this area will have a huge impact on the social location service space and on it’s users privacy concerns.

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Facebook Adds More Talent With Octazen Solutions

February 24, 2010

Facebook’s latest acquisition is a company called Octazen Solutions, which i believe is one most people have not heard about.

Ocatazen Solutions, a small Malaysian startup, are maker of a contact importer that the social network had already been using to grow its number of users by encouraging them to invite their email contacts.

The word around the web is that Octazen is an incredibly successful data-scraping operation, grabbing users’ social graphs from one service and porting them to another.

Spokesperson for Facebook  says: “We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and this is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent,” and refers to the purchase as a “small talent acquisition.”

The real intention of Facebook on the acquisition is not clear as users can already find new Facebook buddies via major services like AIM and Gmail.

With more than 400 million users now Facebook has kept fairly quiet on the acquisition front, focusing primarily on talent buys rather than products. In the last one year Facebook has bought Parakey and Friendfeed.

Could the acquisition be an answer to Google Buzz, or just to a push to consolidate it’s presence on the web. We’ll have to wait and watch.

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