m&a

Hot on the heels of Google's acquisition of German bargain site DailyDeal this week, a new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that the multitude of daily-deal sites will continue to contract via mergers and acquisitions but the valuations of the sites will decline very quickly.

According to the report, since their peak hit just two quarters ago in Q1 2011, the Price per Subscriber and Price per Voucher Sold multiples paid in private company M&A transactions have declined 36 percent and 40 percent respectively in Q3 2011.

The decline appears to be being … Read more

Yahoo announced today that it's acquired IntoNow, a nifty little mobile application that will detect what you're watching on TV and then let you share via Twitter or Facebook that you're watching it. The price was either $13 million or as much as $30 million, depending on which tech blog you prefer to believe. (Oh, wait, now it's $17 million and some earnouts, or something. Money!) Financial terms were not disclosed.

IntoNow launched only 12 weeks ago and has just seven employees: "We were all surprised to say the least but it makes a ton … Read more

eBay, which has been on quite the mobile start-up acquisition spree of late, made it public today that it has acquired Where, a company that makes location-based mobile applications and operates a network of local ads and deals.

More specifically, Boston-based Where has been purchased by eBay's PayPal division, which plans to make the start-up a part of its suite of services for local businesses while keeping the Where consumer app intact.

"Local commerce companies like Where are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping," noted a PayPal blog post by senior director of global communications … Read more

A report Monday in The Wall Street Journal claimed that Twitter is in "advanced talks" to acquire TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client preferred by many of the social-media service's most active users, for about $50 million. "TweetDeck has emerged as a favorite of heavy users of Twitter, letting people track tweets about multiple topics at the same time," the story explained. "The program, which many people download and use on their desktop computers, also lets people write tweets longer than 140 characters, among other features."

But wait: Two months ago, TweetDeck was reported to have sold to UberMedia, … Read more

In what was a much more expedient process than many believed, Google's controversial plan to acquire travel search company ITA Software for $700 million is a done deal. After posting a blog entry on Friday that the deal was close to completion, Google added an update yesterday that said, "Our acquisition of ITA has now closed."

Google's announcement on Friday was that it had reached a settlement with the Department of Justice over regulator concerns that Google would have too much power by owning ITA Software, which provides its travel search technology to companies like Kayak, … Read more

eBay announced today it will acquire GSI Commerce, an e-commerce marketing services company, for $29.25 a share--which will likely come out to around $2.4 billion.

To put things into perspective, that's more than it paid for PayPal and only slightly less than it paid for Skype (which is has now sold off). The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter.

"We intend to lead the next generation of commerce innovation. The acquisition of GSI, which offers the most comprehensive integrated suite of online commerce and interactive marketing services available, will significantly strengthen our ability … Read more

Drive Genius is a hard-working hard-drive utility from longtime Mac developers Prosoft Engineering, with the honorable distinction of being employed at the Apple Store Genius Bar as part of their ProCare Yearly Tune Up service.

The interface of Drive Genius shares some similarities with that of its data-recovery sister program Data Rescue: you navigate through a 3D "tool arena," a sort of virtual lazy Susan of hard-drive tasks that's fast and fluid enough to not be annoying (and it's actually kind of fun). You choose from six primary tasks, Information (with detailed readouts on S.M.… Read more

The ubiquitous and controversial Demand Media has acquired CoverItLive, a live-blogging tool that lots of publishers--including CNET--use for hosting live chat events and covering news in real time.

Demand Media, which grew extraordinarily fast and recently went public, is best known as a freelancer clearinghouse for the production of search-engine-friendly content on sites like eHow (how-to tutorials) and Livestrong.com (health advice). The company has been hit with allegations that the majority of its content is cheap, low-quality, and pollutes search results--that is, that it's a "content farm"--something it understandably denies.

CoverItLive, typically used to quickly … Read more

A barely launched start-up called Beluga, one of several looking to dominate the suddenly hot again group messaging market, announced today that it had been acquired by Facebook.

The company, which had drummed up a moderate amount of hype, was unlikely to sell so early. But it's not that much of a shock that Facebook swooped in to snap it up: Beluga's three co-founders are former Google employees, and were likely appealing to Facebook as the company looks over and over again to fill its product and engineering teams with entrepreneurially minded people by buying their start-ups. What … Read more