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Netvibes acquired by Dassault Systèmes for $26M

Colleen Taylor & Om Malik — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:32:55 +0000

Update from Om Malik at 6:39 a.m. PST, Feb. 9. Netvibes has been sold for about 20 million euros, or roughly $26 million, according to folks familiar with the transaction. While it is not a blockbuster outcome, it is the best possible outcome for the company, which has had a tumultuous history. The company, which was founded by Tariq Krim, a French entrepreneur, was once the shining star of the Web 2.0 movement, but it fell on hard times, only to be rescued by focusing on an entirely different set of customers. Netvibes should also be a cautionary tale for all of today’s shooting stars who get caught up in the hyperbole. My kudos go to CEO Freddy Mini, who helped guide the company to profits and finally to an exit.

Netvibes, the San Francisco–based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards, announced on Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Dassault Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini

The deal makes sense on a few levels, as Netvibes’ engineering team is based in France (CEO Freddy Mini splits his time between France and California.) The company has also been around for a while — since 2005 — and in that time has grown from being a personal RSS feed dashboard to a profitable enterprise web analytics service. Even though there have been a few management changes and strategy pivots along the way, Netvibes’ tenacity and very smart shift toward enterprise products surely helped position it as an attractive acquisition candidate.

As far as the near future goes, it seems that many things for Netvibes will remain the same. A rep for the company said in an email:

Our brand, business, products and team all stay. Our free product will remain free and available to our millions of users. What will change is that Netvibes can innovate even faster.

At the same time, Dassault, which is best known for making 3-D computer-aided design and project life cycle management software used by large corporations for industrial projects (Boeing uses Dassault tools to design its jets, for example), seems on the surface like a fairly unexpected match for a social web–focused company like Netvibes. It will be interesting to see how Netvibes’ tools are integrated into Dassault’s product lineup in the longer run.

Feature image of Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini courtesy of Flickr user snackfight

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Klout makes its first acquisition: Local-mobile app Blockboard

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:41:55 +0000

Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that measures people’s “influence” across a variety of social networks, has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Blockboard, a Twitter-like mobile app that functions as a community bulletin board letting users post messages viewable to other people in their immediate area.

Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but it looks like an acqui-hire more than anything else. Blockboard, which was previously known as BlockChalk, raised $1 million in a seed funding round back in May 2010, and since then the service does not appear to have generated any revenue. The four-person Blockboard team will be joining Klout, and according to the companies the Blockboard product will live on post-deal.

Klout announced the deal in a blog post Tuesday, writing:

“Blockboard has built an amazing local-mobile app that connects neighbors to build stronger communities through technology… With their experience, Blockboard brings an awareness of how social media can be meaningfully woven into the fabric of a local community, as well as a killer mobile app development team.”

Klout kept a relatively low profile for a couple months after some privacy-related snafus last year, so the announcement of the Blockboard acquisition serves as a public relations re-entry of sorts. It looks like Klout is not giving up any time soon, and it will be interesting to see how the company develops on the mobile and local fronts going forward.

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The state of e-commerce: M&A surging, daily deals still big

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:58:18 +0000

It’s been a big part of the Internet picture for well over a decade, but right now e-commerce is really hitting its stride, according to a new report out of CB Insights and the BizTech@Wharton Conference.

The overall investment of venture capital in the e-commerce field has hastened recently, according to the report. After more than a year of relative weakness, e-commerce began attracting lots of VC money in late 2010. Although the investments declined quarter-over-quarter in the third quarter of 2011, the quantity of deals and total dollars invested was still more than double what it had been during the third quarter of 2010:

Those investment dollars are apparently just following the action: Mergers and acquisitions in the e-commerce space have especially taken off over the past 24 months, the report indicates. Far and away the biggest driver of e-commerce M&A is the daily deals sector, which has accounted for 74 M&A transactions since the beginning of 2008:

It’s clear that discount e-commerce sites — particularly those that offer daily deals and flash sales — have grown significantly in recent years. While the amount and number of investments in daily deal companies dipped slightly in the most recent quarter (perhaps due to a fear of “fatigue” about such sites) flash sales companies are attracting more money than ever:

Now, of course, venture capital investment does not always translate into a sector’s full-on success. But it does indicate that there’s optimism that it has lots of room to grow. E-commerce proved to be a bigger factor than ever for shoppers over this year’s Thanksgiving weekend, the time that kicks off the annual holiday shopping season. If these investors are on target, the strength we’re seeing from online shopping now could be just the beginning.

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Web app security startup Unsubscribe.com sells to TrustedID

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:07:33 +0000

Unsubscribe.com, the Los Angeles–based startup that makes security and privacy tools for email and social networking applications, has been acquired by TrustedID, a Palo Alto, Calif.–based credit and identity protection technology firm.

Financial details of the deal have not been announced.

Unsubscribe.com makes some handy tools. Its flagship product was a browser plug-in that integrates with your email and allows you to unsubscribe from any mailing list with one click. This past summer, the company rolled out a new Social Monitor feature that shows the various safety levels of the applications that users have installed on their social media profiles like the ones on Facebook.

When I last interviewed Unsubscribe’s CEO, James Siminoff, earlier this summer, Unsubscribe.com had just under 10 employees based in L.A., and the startup had taken on $2.1 million in venture capital. No word on whether the team will be moving up to Silicon Valley or how many of them will be sticking around post-acquisition. But it seems that the company will live on within TrustedID; Siminoff wrote in a blog post regarding the deal:

I look forward to the next few months as we integrate the products. Also email and Social Monitor were just 2 of the features we had thought of, wait till you see what we are launching next.

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Salesforce buys Model Metrics in mobile and social push

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:16:24 +0000

Salesforce.com on Monday announced its acquisition of Model Metrics, a company that provides mobile and social cloud consulting services. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The Model Metrics is meant to “add mobile and social expertise” to Salesforce’s current offerings, the company said in a statement announcing the deal. The deal should close by the end of Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter, which ends on January 31, 2012. Also in the deal announcement, Salesforce COO George Hu said:

“The addition of Model Metrics’ mobile and social expertise will accelerate Salesforce.com’s ability to lead the shift to the social enterprise and empower partners to develop their social enterprise practice.”

Model Metrics was founded in 2003 and now has more than 500 customers. According to SEC filings, it has raised a total of nearly $6.5 million from venture capital investors. The company is no stranger to Salesforce: It has completed more than 1,000 Salesforce deployments for companies of all sizes, according to the statement announcing the acquisition.

This is just the latest in a series of moves Salesforce has made in recent months to push for more social and mobile technologies. In March the company acquired Radian6, a social media monitoring platform; and before that it bought social collaboration platform Manymoon.

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Facebook’s new acqui-hire: HTML5 mobile app startup Strobe

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:47:23 +0000

Facebook announced Tuesday its latest talent acquisition: Strobe Corp., a San Francisco-based mobile app development startup. Financial details have not been disclosed.

Strobe was born out of SproutCore, an open-source JavaScript framework built by Charles Jolley in 2007 while he was a full-time engineer at Apple. Jolley left Apple to found Strobe in mid-2010. Om wrote in detail about Strobe in June 2010, and my colleague Ryan Kim reported on the company’s technology in early September as well. Essentially, Strobe is an app delivery network that provides SproutCore support, and is aimed at getting mobile apps built with HTML5 up and running and into app stores.

According to a blog post announcing the deal on Strobe’s website, the company “was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device.” The company has around 15 staff, and its board includes Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad and Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures; both VC firms invested in Strobe.

Following the deal, Strobe says its service will continue to be available to existing users in its existing beta form, and SproutCore will live on as an independent project.

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Notable: LSI buys SandForce for $400M

Colleen Taylor — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:15:56 +0000

Venture capitalists have generally given semiconductor startups the cold shoulder for years now in favor of the web and software spaces. But an acquisition announced Wednesday afternoon indicates it may be time for VCs to warm up to chip technology once again.

LSI Corporation announced Wednesday plans to acquire SandForce, a five-year-old Silicon Valley-based semiconductor startup, for $322 million in cash. On a fully diluted equity value basis, we’re told, the deal is worth about $400 million.

It’s notable because it is the largest M&A deal for a U.S.-based venture-backed semiconductor company in nearly a decade. Other big semiconductor acquisitions have happened in the past ten years, but they have involved divestitures from publicly-traded companies (ON Semiconductor’s $522 million acquisition of Sanyo Semiconductor) or companies borne out publicly-traded firms (Micron’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Numonyx, the brainchild of both STMicro and Intel.)

SandForce, meanwhile, has a more straightforward startup story: Founded in December 2006, the company raised $60 million in four rounds of venture capital from investors including DCM, Storm Ventures, TransLink Capital, UMC Capital, Red Maple Ventures, Darwin Ventures and Canaan Partners.

The $400 million payback to SandForce’s VCs could embolden those firms and others to invest a bit more aggressively in hard technology startups. That could be good news for chipheads — and the rest of us who just love the cool gadgets they ultimately help create.

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Cardpool acquired by Safeway’s gift card division

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:16:17 +0000

Cardpool, the San Francisco-based startup that lets people buy, sell and trade unused gift cards, has been acquired by Blackhawk Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of grocery giant Safeway.

Details about the deal are scarce: Cardpool co-founder Anson Tsai declined to tell me how many staff his startup has, only saying that the team will grow significantly now that its part of a larger company. In regards to how much money Cardpool sold for, Tsai said, “Unfortunately we are not disclosing financial terms at this time, but all our investors (there are a lot of them) are quite happy.”

When we first wrote about Cardpool in March 2010, the company had raised $130,000 in angel funding from a variety of individual investors, including Mitch Kapor and Y Combinator, which is where it was first incubated. Cardpool has apparently grown very quickly since then: The company says it is now processing more than $100,000 in gift cards every day.

And as for Safeway’s Blackhawk Network? From Cardpool’s blog post announcing the deal:

“Blackhawk Network is the world’s leading provider of gift card, prepaid, telecom, and financial products. Every week, they reach more than 200 million consumers spanning 17 countries in a network of leading grocery, big box, convenience, pharmacy, and specialty stores including Safeway, Kroger, Tesco, Giant Eagle, Ahold, and GiftCardMall.com.”

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Yahoo investors have questions, but execs don’t have answers

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:24:04 +0000

Tim Morse, Yahoo's CFO and interim CEO

Yahoo on Tuesday held a conference call with analysts and investors to discuss its latest quarterly earnings results. With all the buzz around the company recently, it seemed like the latest earnings report would certainly be an event to watch. But during the call, CFO and interim CEO Tim Morse made it clear repeatedly that the headline-making issues of recent weeks — the abrupt departure of Carol Bartz as CEO, and Yahoo’s status as a potential takeover target for other companies — were strictly off limits.

Morse kicked off the call by obliquely referencing the recent turmoil:

“The board is actively looking at a full range of options to return the company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. The board also has said that when it has something to announce, it will do so. That will take time. And it will not be today, and it will not be on this call.”

Alright then. Of course, that did not stop analysts from trying to get more details on what exactly is going on in Yahoo’s boardroom during the call’s question and answer session. But Morse, who does not hold a seat on Yahoo’s board, repeatedly used his relative outsider status to deflect such inquiries. A few examples:

When one analyst specifically asked about why Carol Bartz was dismissed when the company’s financial performance under her leadership was in line with investor expectations, Morse said: “The board’s process is the board’s process.”

When asked how the current CEO search is coming, Morse said: “All I can tell you is it’s underway. That’s the board’s process, and I don’t have any comment on the board’s process.”

And when asked about the ongoing strategic review, which ostensibly includes looking at options to sell Yahoo in part or altogether, Morse said: “This will take some time. The board wants to do what’s best for the company, and that doesn’t imply that they put a specific timeline on this. The board’s process will be what it will be, and the timing will be what it will be.”

However, Yahoo’s investors did not seem to be too put off by Yahoo’s managerial reticence on all things strategic. The company’s stock was trading slightly up in the after-hours stock market Tuesday evening (the earnings call was held at 5:00pm Eastern Time, after the market closed.) It seems that even with the significant revenue and profit drops Yahoo reported Tuesday, a good deal of people still think the company can turn around; and some are apparently willing to give its executive team and corporate board space while they try to make that happen. It will be interesting to see, though, how long it will be before patience starts to run thin — and investors start to demand more answers.

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HP-Autonomy deal nearly done

Barb Darrow — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:55:58 +0000

Autonomy’s impending acquisition by Hewlett-Packard is nearly done.

The $10.3 billion deal was cleared by regulators in the U.S. and Australia on Thursday. Autonomy shareholders still have until Monday morning 10 a.m. U.K time to weigh in, according to a company spokeswoman cited in reports.

Autonomy’s enterprise search capabilities could be a boost to HP’s big data strategy and the purchase itself was a cornerstone of former CEO Leo Apotheker’s grand plan to build HP’s enterprise software and cloud services portfolio.

There was some question last week after Meg Whitman succeeded Apotheker as CEO as to whether his whole strategy would prevail, but it looks like the Autonomy piece of it is proceeding as planned.

The Autonomy buy was controversial from the moment it was announced on HP’s Aug. 18 earnings call because of the price. The next day, in a show of disapproval of this deal and HP’s decision to shop its PC business around, Wall Street lopped more than $12 billion off HP’s market cap.

The whole pricing question sparked an escalating war of words between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and HP/Autonomy. That controversy flared again Thursday when Oracle posted a statement about the matter again, and Autonomy responded.

Oracle and HP, once fairly tight partners, have been at odds since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and its hardware business, putting the two companies in direct competition in the data center hardware market. That contention ratcheted up after Oracle hired Mark Hurd, HP’s deposed CEO, last year as co-president.

Thursday there was more speculation that HP’s decision to replace Apotheker with Whitman was made to shore up HP’s share price so that Oracle could not buy the company.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melmada.

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