Additionally, Gdgt is rumoured to be in talks with Cnet who want to acquire the company. There were no details on the numbers and founders declined to comment.

Gdgt is a great technology product database and its great to see them growing nicely.

p.s. It also helps if your founders also founded Engadget.. the largest gadget site on the web!

• i Life Solutions: Best In Home Personalised Theatre – February 9, 2012
• Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 Mobile Phones Coming Next Week – October 24, 2011
• Wowee One Slim Review – October 17, 2011
• iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Already Over 1 Million – October 10, 2011
• Tesla Coil Playing Music – September 19, 2011

Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet originally appeared on: Crenk
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It seems like HTC are now shopping around for their own mobile operating system. HTC has made a huge amount of money from Android based smartphones, but they feel that this is just simply not enough. After all, Google’s free operating system is getting expensive.

“We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse,” Wang said in an interview with the Economic Observer of China, noting that HTC’s Sense UI would allow the company to offer distinctive products using any operating system. HP’s webOS is an obvious candidate, and although Wang did not refer to the platform specifically, the report notes that HTC and Samsung have both been in talks with HP. ”We can use any OS we want. We are able to make things different from our rivals on the second or third layer of a platform,” Wang said. “Our strength lies in understanding an OS, but it does not mean that we have to produce an OS.”

• Jolicloud Reaching Final Version this Week – July 13, 2010
• App Inventor for Android – July 12, 2010
• HTC – Over Half of Phones Will Be Android in 2010 – July 26, 2009
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• Ubuntu Screenshots of 11.10 – September 26, 2011

HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System originally appeared on: Crenk
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Dropbox is a web based file hosting service which keeps all of the files in perfect sync across numerous operating systems and devices. Dropbox has already received around $7.2 million in funding and is expected to have $100 million in revenues in 2011.

It seems a shock that Dropbox investors didnt jump at that price, but Im guessing they are holding out for over a billion dollar valuation.

• Microsoft Buying Adobe? – October 9, 2010
• Your Files Everywhere with DropBox – July 9, 2009
• Video: Worlds Largest Apple Store in Grand Central Station New York – November 21, 2011
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• Official Steve Jobs Biography is Out – October 24, 2011

Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million originally appeared on: Crenk
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Larry Page CEO of Google had this to say of the acquisition:

“Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”

Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile, said in a statement that the Android platform will remain open:

“Our vision for Android is unchanged, and Google remains firmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community. We will continue to work with all of our valued Android partners to develop and distribute innovative Android-powered devices.”

Im very surprised they didnt look at acquiring HTC.

Motorola is a great business and has over $3 billion in the bank. They also have 19,000 employees and produce set top boxes and phone accessories. It will be interesting to see how they can put both businesses together.

• Android Debuts on AT&T with Motorola Backflip – January 13, 2010
• Google Buys Motorola Sketch: Steve Jobs as Darth Vader – August 17, 2011
• Google is Offering $4 Billion Dollars to Buy Twitter? – November 20, 2010
• Apple Approves Google Voice iPhone Apps – September 20, 2010
• [infographic] Google’s Appetite – August 29, 2010

Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion originally appeared on: Crenk
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It now seems like LogMeIn will be able to extend its Gravity platform into smart embedded devices.

If you have been looking for a way to share your screen with friends, family or work colleages, then LogMeIn is the way to do it.

• Join.me: Free Screen Sharing and Online Meeting Tool: Even Available for iPhone and iPad – February 10, 2011
• What’s Interesting with Pinterest? – December 20, 2011
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million – September 12, 2011

Pachube Joins LogMeIn Screen Sharing Service originally appeared on: Crenk
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It has now been confirmed that Microsoft have acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in cash. Microsoft and Skype are yet to confirm the deal themselves, but a press conference is expected later today.

This is a great result for all investors in Skype who were starting to get a little nervous about their anticipated IPO later this year.

Who were the big winners in this deal:

• If the price is $8.5 billion. eBay received around $2.55 billion for 30%. Great result!
• Founders – Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis made about $1.19 billion for their 14% stake.
• Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.

It will now be very interesting to see what Microsoft can do with Skype. There is already a lot of talk about Skype on Kinect and we will post a little something about that within the next hour.

Why did Microsoft buy Skype:

• Great enterprise tool that uses Skype voice call, video calling and sharing options
• Relationship with carrier who are looking to partner with Skype
• Mainly for Windows Phone 7. Skype will offer Microsoft a competitor to Google Voice and Apple Facetime

• Microsoft Acquisition of Skype Could Really Help Video Kinect – May 11, 2011
• Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 Mobile Phones Coming Next Week – October 24, 2011
• Avatar Kinect: Virtual Meeting on Your Xbox 360 – September 26, 2011
• Xbox Kinect 360 With Over 5000 Swarovski Crystals – September 24, 2011
• Samsung Rumoured to be Acquiring Nokia – June 8, 2011

Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion in Cash originally appeared on: Crenk
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Popcap raised around $22.5 million in funding over a year ago and it has been reported that they are preparing to go public. We will see if this acquisition can help them achieve that goal.

• Where Would We Be Without Facebook? – April 29, 2011
• PDF to Microsoft Word Converter Facebook Edition – December 4, 2011
• Washington Post Facebook Social Reader News Application – November 26, 2011
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• Dont Just Jump Ship to Apple So Easily – September 27, 2011

PopCap Games Acquires ZipZapPlay and Their Facebook Games originally appeared on: Crenk
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Warner Music Group will start to review the second round of bids this week. Currently, there are 10 groups who have reportedly made bids between $2.8 billion and $3 billion. Bidders include Live Nation, BMG Rights Management (a joint venture of Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Platinum Equity, Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Company, billionaire Len Blavatnik, investor Ron Perelman and Sony.

It will be interesting to see which bid comes out on top!

• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million – September 12, 2011
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• Pachube Joins LogMeIn Screen Sharing Service – July 25, 2011

Warner Music Group Evaluating Bids This Wek: New Owner Coming Soon originally appeared on: Crenk
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The acquisition is from Goal.com’s investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners. The price wasn’t disclosed.

With Goal.com, Perform claims to reach over 95 million people per month.

• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million – September 12, 2011
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• Pachube Joins LogMeIn Screen Sharing Service – July 25, 2011

Goal.com Sold to Perform Group: 95 Million User Base originally appeared on: Crenk
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Im still in shock that AOL has acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent an internal memo to all AOL employees and here is exactly what it said.

AOLers,

We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet. We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world—The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet.

Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader—one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. Arianna and team have created a brand and a destination that focuses on the consumer experience. By combining The Huffington Post with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video offerings, local expertise and enormous reach, we will create a company that is laser-focused on serving our audiences across every platform imaginable – social, local, video, mobile and tablet.

The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus – 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.

The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content. In addition, Arianna Huffington is a world-renowned expert on women’s topics and issues, and has enabled The Huffington Post to grow rapidly by continually developing new audiences.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way.

The Huffington Post will join the family of AOL Brands that are destinations for an influencer audience, brands like TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, and Moviefone. Uniquely, The Huffington Post is the platform for influential people — the people that drive trends, commerce, politics, entertainment, news, and information. Adding this strategic platform to our already strong network of sites, including the AOL homepage, has the potential to make AOL the most influential company in the content space.

Arianna Huffington is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space and someone that is even more successful in building communities and relationships in every corner of the globe. The Huffington Post and Arianna have created a company that has partnered with the most successful and well-known leaders in all aspects of society that touch important topics to give consumers direct access to the most influential decision makers and community leaders.

This acquisition will create a high-quality and diverse digital ecosystem encompassing local, national and international news, politics, entertainment, technology, fashion, sports, health, personal finance, green, lifestyle, the arts and more. This deal will combine the amazing talent at AOL with the innovative and talented staff of The Huffington Post. Here are just a few high-level points around what this deal brings to market:

• Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117MM unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and ~270MM monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).
• The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet. It grew 22% last year – that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18% – and 15x as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).
• Both AOL and The Huffington Post count powerful, affluent users among their top loyal visitors, significantly over-indexing in $100K+ income users.
• AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.
• Between AOL’s innovative Project Devil ad unit, engaging users for 27 seconds longer than traditional display ads, and The Huffington Post’s highly-vocal community, with 4MM+ comments per month, we will marry attention-grabbing content and brand experiences for both advertisers and consumers.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a premier global/local syndication network at scale. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely, informative and entertaining way.

To maximize the strategic advantage of this great deal, we will be creating a new group at AOL called The Huffington Post Media Group. Within this group will be AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and our new friends at The Huffington Post. We will continue operating the towns structure, AOL.com and HuffingtonPost.com.

I’m thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will join AOL’s executive team as President and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. We have asked Jon Brod to lead the overall operational integration on the AOL side of the combined entities. Jon will lead the local group integration and work closely with David Eun and the teams in AOL Media. We will work quickly with The Huffington Post to create a combined organizational design to coincide with the deal closing. While we wait for the required regulatory reviews to be completed and the transaction to close before implementing the design, we will move very quickly to plan the details of the integration of the two companies. To this end, we will announce the new organizational structure as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we will continue creating great content and products for our consumers within the town structure and stay laser-focused on the aggressive goals we have set for our winter luge. We are on the right track and will continue our weekly operating cadence and town structure to drive successful results against our company goals.

Here’s a special message for all of you we taped to welcome The Huffington Post and Arianna to our AOL Family:

http://today.office.aol.com/company-news/2011/02/aol-agrees-buy-huffington-post

And of course we wanted to welcome Arianna to our “You’ve Got” video of the day—check her out on AOL.com.

We will be holding a company all hands meeting to address your questions related to today’s exciting news. We will video conference from our New York office on the 6th Floor at 9:30 AM ET and will be joined by Arianna Huffington and key executives from her organization. We will also be holding a call for our west coast offices at 2:00 PM ET and for our Patch offices at 2:45 PM ET. See below for meeting info (conference rooms will be sent out shortly).

AOL is playing to win…and The Huffington Post and AOL will occupy a unique place in the future of the Internet. Let’s go get it done.

–TA

• AOL Closing Over 30 Sites and Laying Off 900 Employees – March 23, 2011
• Did AOL Really Buy The Huffington Post for the Great Content? – February 8, 2011
• GoViral Video Advertising Network Acquired by AOL Europe for $96.7 million – February 1, 2011
• The Advertising Collective: AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft Join Forces – November 9, 2011
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011

AOL Acquire the Huffington Post for $315 Million: Internal Email originally appeared on: Crenk
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All this came after the administrator (PricewaterhouseCoopers) was appointed. The administrators promptly announced the sale of EMI to Citigroup.

• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million – September 12, 2011
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• Pachube Joins LogMeIn Screen Sharing Service – July 25, 2011

Citigroup Has Acquired 100% of EMI originally appeared on: Crenk
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The initial purchase is for $74.1 million and $22.6 million in a two year earn out.

We’re hearing this deal was lead directly by Kate Burns, SVP, AOL Europe. René Rechtman, CEO, goviral secured $8.82 million Series A funding from European VC Kennet Partners in 2009.

In a statement Burns said: “Video is core to AOL’s consumer programming strategy and goviral has created an incredibly compelling platform that delivers highly measureable and cost effective solutions to publishers and advertisers.”

• AOL Acquire the Huffington Post for $315 Million: Internal Email – February 7, 2011
• The Advertising Collective: AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft Join Forces – November 9, 2011
• Gdgt Sign Deal with Engadget and in Acquisition Talks with Cnet – October 25, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Dropbox Rejects Acquistion from Apple for $800 Million – September 12, 2011

GoViral Video Advertising Network Acquired by AOL Europe for $96.7 million originally appeared on: Crenk
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Google made earlier an initial offer of $2.5 billion to acquire Twitter, but not only the micro-blogging service refused this offer, but also said that the amount suggested was “insulting”. That’s why Google is apparently analyzing to increase the bid up to $4 billion dollars.

According to the report, an important source related to Twitter said that 3 months ago they’ve received a similar offer of $4 billion dollars from an unknown buyer (Microsoft?) but it was rejected.

What do you think? Can any of these big companies actually buy Twitter?

Twitter could resist these kinds of bids, in the same way Facebook did?

• Microsoft Buying Adobe? – October 9, 2010
• Yelp Walks Away from Google’s Half a Billion Dollars – December 22, 2009
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• Microsoft Excel Template: Analytics for Twitter – June 13, 2011
• Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion in Cash – May 10, 2011

Google is Offering $4 Billion Dollars to Buy Twitter? originally appeared on: Crenk
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 Both of these technology monsters share a common enemy: Apple. Microsoft never had the chance to enter the mobile world and Adobe’s is struggling for not be forgotten since Apple decided they were not going to support Flash in their iOS (iPhones and iPads operating systems). And these are two big reasons for unifying and beat the same dragon.

NY Times also gives some details about this meeting, even though there’s nothing official, here are some of the topics of the meeting that took a little more than an hour: Adobe’s possible acquisition by Microsoft and possibilities for Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash can co exist in the same operating system.

Specialists said that this acquisition could cost Microsoft 15 billion dollars.

What do you think? Can you see these two fighting against Apple?

• Google is Offering $4 Billion Dollars to Buy Twitter? – November 20, 2010
• Poison Apple, the T-Shirt – June 2, 2010
• Smokescreen, Direct Conversion from Flash to HTML5 – May 31, 2010
• Adobe Suspends Flash Development for iPhone – April 23, 2010
• New TiVo Introduces Competitive Offerings – March 9, 2010

Microsoft Buying Adobe? originally appeared on: Crenk
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We should know by now that any of the largest companies in the world right now are in fact the most important ones because of their appetite and their capabilities to buy other companies. Google indeed took some great decisions in the last 10 years about this: YouTube, FeedBurner, Postini and Picasa are just a few of those.

Take a look to the complete list. Take note that this infographic divides the acquisition in time and type (technology, market and talent):

• Hajj Pilgrimage Live to Watch on YouTube for Free – November 4, 2011
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• YouTube To Launch Movies On Demand Service: Key iTunes Competitor – April 26, 2011
• Watch Live: Royal Wedding to be Streamed Live on YouTube – April 19, 2011
• YouTube Videos Now Allows You to Alter Playback Speed – February 19, 2011

[infographic] Google’s Appetite originally appeared on: Crenk
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