Crenk

Seesmic which claims to be the Twitter for video has just acquired Twhirl. Although Seesmic is still in Alpha this seems to be a good purchase on the outside. Twhirl is one of the most popular Adobe AIR apps and allows users to post to their Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce accounts. This is the first acquisition ever of a pure AIR application and im sure it wont be the last.

For other coverage on this acquisition take a look at BlogHerald and Mashable. Im also interested to see what Arrington has to say about the acquisition, because he is an investor in Seesmic, however Mark Hendrickson did the review for Techcrunch of the story.

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The New York times reports that Getty Images is now up for sale. The world’s biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the situation said Sunday.

Getty was founded back in 1995 and current has a catalogue of 3.2 billion images and 4 million unique visitors to its website each month. These figures make the company very lucrative. Goldman Sachs was hired to advise it on a potential sale and Getty has already attracted several potential buyers, mostly private equity firms, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and others.

Bids for the company are due to be finalised by the end of the month. A sale is not assured, but with this high end company being up for grabs, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few private equity firms join forces to finalise a sale.

AOL has been putting the final touches on its new ad conglomerate, Platform A. AOL has confirmed that they have purchased Quigo for a reported $340 million. Quigo is a contextual ad network which has two main services, AdSonar and FeedPoint. Adsonar is very similar to Google’s Adsense in that it provides targeted advertisements on various websites, and FeedPoint is their search engine marketing tool.

AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco said, “With Quigo, we are putting the final pieces of Platform A in place. We will be able to offer advertisers and publishers the most advanced set of tools, including contextual and behavioral targeting, superior analytics, and access to the largest display network in the marketplace.”

Quigo will become part of Platform A which already includes Advertising.com, Tacoda, Third Screen Media, Lightningcast and Adtech.

Overall, the purchases that AOL have made has been a bit surprising. All of these ad networks are in a variety of areas and it is going to be very interesting over the next few years to see if they can put them all into one neat package. Targeting users is vital when it comes to PPC marketing and the company that can be the most efficient at this will control the future of PPC.

The news of the day must be that Google has acquired Jaiku. Jaiku is a microblogging site similar to Pownce and Twitter. It is a bit of a surprise that Google has opted to purchase Jaiku (which hails from Finland) instead of Twitter (the market leader) or Pownce (the new kid on the block with the best user interface).

Have a look at what everyone else has been saying about the deal:

• Jaiku
• Techcrunch
• CenterNetworks
• Mashable
• Rev2
  

Twitter has not long got Series A Funding, so it would have been rare for them to be purchased. Pownce on the other hand seems to be on the downhill slide. Since their highly publicised launch Pownce has never lived up to expectations and with the recent news about Kevin Rose potentially moving Pownce features over to Digg, it has just never recovered. If you look at Alexa data on Pownce you will notice it wont be too long until it dies a death, on the quick slide down. Its seems that Jaiku was an important match with Google because it has more of a presence in activity streams and mobile presence and those are the markets Google is trying to gain more market share. It that last week Google also launched Adsense for mobile, so this will be a nice addition to boost the start of that new service.

It has been reported by Techcrunch that Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC.com. It is reported that the deal was closed on October the 5th and all in cash. This is MSNBC’s for acquisition in its 11 year history. Look out for the site to become a citizens journal with social media thrown in.

I have always thought that MSNBC was just a copy of news stories from other Microsoft or NBC sites and not a stand alone news site and entity.

The latest news is the Google has agreed to acquire mobile startup Zingku. There is very little know about the company, but according to Zingku themselves this is what they do:

“Our service is designed from the mobile phone, outward, allowing you to create and exchange things of interest ranging from invitations to “mobile flyers” with friends in a trusted manner. On the mobile phone, Zingku uses standard text messaging and picture messaging features that come with every phone. On the web, our service uses your standard web browser and instant messenger. There is nothing to install.”

This is a bit of a strange one, Techcrunch cant even find out much about the company. Come on Arrington im sure you must have some contacts somewhere that can get you some inside information!