Groupon’s hotly-awaited initial stock offering will either stand as a beacon of hope to technology and Internet stocks of all kinds, or as a giant warning sign indicating a huge bubble of irrational exuberance. The company’s prospectus contains plenty of evidence for both sides. Read more »
Just months after raising $950 million, Groupon has filed for an IPO as it looks to stay ahead of a gaggle of competitors in the daily deal market. The company faces challenges in its high user acquisition cost and expansion into local and mobile. Read more »
Gamification startup Badgeville expects to book $10 million in sales for 2011, its first year in business, according to CEO Kris Duggan. He claims that being the new kid on the gamification block is an asset. “We’ve built this over last year with modern approaches.” Read more »
Kayak kicked off 2011 with major sales growth in the run-up to its planned IPO, according to a regulatory filing. The travel search company made $52.6 million in the first three months of 2011, representing a 43.4 percent increase over the same period in 2010 Read more »
This morning, as algae oil maker Solazyme made its debut on the Nasdaq, the company’s co-founders and investors are popping the champagne corks on pricing shares at the high end at $18 per share. Who made good in Solazyme’s debut? Hint: The Roda Group, co-founders and Braemar. Read more »
The global economy continues to face uncertainty, but despite this, many technology companies have cash on hand and are opting to spend it on mergers and acquisitions. Here we examine some likely strategies from five different companies: IBM, Oracle, HP, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Read more »
Twitter officially confirmed its long-rumored acquisition of TweetDeck on Wednesday morning. Twitter/TweetDeck rumors have been flying around for weeks now, so lots of folks have had time to form opinions about the tie-up. Here are some of the more interesting takes on the situation. Read more »
We’re hearing that Cisco is shutting down Eos, a social publishing platform aimed at media and entertainment companies, as part of its ongoing restructuring efforts. While Eos was by all accounts a cool service, shuttering it is a smart move from a strategic perspective. Read more »
After overseeing 75 acquisitions in 7 years at Cisco in the 1990s, then-CSO Mike Volpi helped the company become a role model for tech M&A and an acquisition-as-growth strategy. In this second post of a two-part series, he reveals four more strategies for smart acquisitions. Read more »
After overseeing 75 acquisitions in seven years at Cisco in the 1990s, then-CSO Mike Volpi helped the company become a role model for tech M&A and an acquisition-as-growth strategy. In this two-part series, he reveals six ways companies can make sure their acquisitions create value. Read more »
Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype is the largest the company has ever made, and it’s raised many questions in the process. This research note examines Skype’s overall value and where it fits strategically into the world of Microsoft. From Office 365 and Bing to Xbox Kinect and Windows Phone, there are numerous ways in which Microsoft can leverage the functionality of its newest addition — and numerous risks it could incur in the process. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Cisco, Panasonic and Google. For a full list of companies and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
LinkedIn made its NYSE debut Thursday morning with a bang, with an IPO that made $352.8 million for the company. The question now is: What will LinkedIn buy with its new cash? Here’s a short list of startups that could make it onto LinkedIn’s shopping list. Read more »
Recent reports have Microsoft set to enter talks to acquire Nokia’s mobile business outright for a price tag that could be in the range of $30 billion. It’as a risky move, but here’s why a takeover of the world’s largest handset maker could pay off. Read more »
Landis+Gyr is on the auction block, and big smart grid suitors like General Electric, Toshiba and Honeywell ABB are rumored to be interested in paying $2 billlion-plus for the smart meter giant. Strategic buyers could find value by integrating into their own lines of business. Read more »
Nuance announced Wednesday that it has already signed on 2,500 devs to its Mobile Developer Program in its first 90 days. Dozens of voice-enabled apps have already been created through the program. Nuance announced this milestone amid rumors of ongoing strategic partnership talks with Apple. Read more »
AVOS, the new startup run by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, could be targeting the consumer and brand research market with its acquisition of Tap11. Such a move would pit the startup against tech industry stalwarts like Google and Salesforce. Read more »
Photobucket wants to reclaim a spot at the top of the crowded photo and video sharing space, and it’s prepared to open its wallet to do so. The company is actively looking at potential acquisition targets, CEO Tom Munro told me in an interview this week. Read more »
This week, tech insiders and observers are abuzz with estimates of how much Facebook is really worth. What set off the latest round of chatter was a Sunday morning Wall Street Journal report that Facebook could have a valuation of $100 billion after an IPO. Read more »
Dogster, the old-school social network for dog and cat owners has been purchased by Say Media in the first deal for the recently created content and advertising company. Say Media was created last September when blogging platform SixApart was swallowed by video ad network VideoEgg. Read more »
Level 3 Communications agreed to buy Global Crossing in a transaction worth $3 billion. The deal is a sign of consolidation as broadband becomes the connecting fabric of our lives. But the question isn’t why this deal between two telecommunications backbone providers happened, but why now? Read more »
Fourteen venture-backed companies went public in the first quarter of 2011 raising 1.4 billion, the highest number to go public since 2007, according to the NVCA. And many companies that did make it to the public markets are trading at or above their original offering prices. Read more »
Cisco said it plans to buy newScale, a software provider that allows more control and visibility inside a compute cloud. The deal highlights the rise in M&A activity among cloud vendors as well as the need for more accountability in corporate cloud environments. Read more »
Investors loved the wind energy sector, and they showed it by blowing the most investment dollars that way in 2010. They also were most busy with energy efficiency deals, the number of which surpassed other cleantech categories last year, according to a U.S. market report by Peachtree Capital Advisors. Read more »
Venture capital industry is seeing a return of the good times thanks to growing number number of exits, according to data from NVCA, during Q3 2010, there were 104 mergers and 14 IPOs of venture backed companies. And the trend will continue through 2010. Read more »
Novell has put itself on the auction block, but a deal has been slow in closing. According to sources close to the company, this likely stems from the difficulty of accurately assessing the value of Novell’s patent portfolio in conjunction with its legacy product portfolio and associated business. Read more »
OpenTable, one of the big beneficiaries of the emergence of mobile Internet, acquired UK-based toptable.com today for roughly $55 million in cash. With this acquisition, OpenTable is indicating that it is ready to go after the European market in earnest. Read more »
The mobile and wireless industry is in a state of flux as new technologies emerge at an increasingly rapid pace. As discussed in a new report at GigaOM Pro, where there is market disruption, venture capitalists will search for new opportunities to build new businesses. Read more »
Unlike the technology IPO market, the mergers & acquisitions market continues to be on an upswing. PriceWaterhouseCoopers says that during the second quarter of 2010 there were 36 technology transactions worth $11.37 billion, versus the first quarter of 2010 when 34 deals totaled $18.96 billion. Read more »
Last night a group of M&A gurus from the corporate development teams at top tech acquirers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter gave advice to group of startups. Each has a bit of a different style, and a bit of a different target acquisition. Read more »
The web has evolved to a point where mergers are starting to make strategic sense. Its division into two parts — an information web and a conversation web — is becoming more and more of an acute reality to big web companies. Read more »
