Google has entered into an agreement to acquire online ad-optimization firm Teracent, the search giant announced in a blog post on Monday. The transaction is subject to several closing conditions, but is expected to close by the end of the quarter.
Google said it has been "busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the Web," according to the blog post. After examining Teracent's technology, the company felt that it fit "neatly" into its display-advertising goals, the blog said.
Teracent certainly brings something new to Google's advertising efforts. The company's technology tweaks images, products, messages, or colors to optimize ad units based on the viewer's location, what language they speak, the kind of content they're viewing, the local time, and how well particular units have performed in the past. It does all that work in real time as the algorithm examines the ad's environment.
"This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns," Google wrote in a blog post. "In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers Web users better ads and more ad-funded web content."
Teracent should be integrated into Google's advertising efforts by the end of the quarter. Neither company divulged how much Teracent was acquired for.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Collaborative-storage provider Box.net on Tuesday announced that it had acquired Mountain View, Calif.,-based Increo Solutions, a company with two Web products: Embedit.in and Backboard.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Embedit.in, which was launched in June, lets users post and share their documents in the cloud using an Adobe Flash-based viewer. And Backboard, which is the company's only paid product, lets users get feedback and collaborate on projects using that same document viewer.
In a company blog post on the acquisition, Box's community manager, Sean Lindo, said these products will continue to run independently but that both would later be integrated into Box.net as added features.
TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has just acquired social travel start-up Dopplr. The rumored acquisition price is between 10 million and 15 million Euros, which is around $15 million to $22 million.
In an effort to stop the bleeding at the cell phone giant, Nokia has been acquiring a string of smaller companies. With intense competition from Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry, Nokia has been struggling to keep pace in the mobile industry. Om Malik compares the acquisition spree at Nokia to what we have seen at Yahoo in the last few years.
It will be interesting to see how Dopplr as a service fits into Nokia's strategy. It's unclear at this point if it wants the business as it exists, its technology, or its talent. Dopplr has a fairly small, but hardcore user base and has intense competition from companies like TripIt, so it is a curious acquisition choice. If it keeps the service intact at all, look for Nokia to roll out a mobile version of Dopplr out as an exclusive app on their devices.
Automattic, the company behind blogging platform WordPress, announced Tuesday that it has acquired After the Deadline, a service that finds spelling and grammar errors in blog posts. The deal's terms were not disclosed.
After the Deadline's spelling-, grammar-, and style-checking tools are now available to 7.5 million WordPress blogs. It's also available as a downloadable plug-in for WordPress users.
Looking ahead, Automattic plans to make After the Deadline open-source. It hopes the community will play a part in improving it. After the Deadline's founder Raphael Mudge, will stay on at Automattic to deliver After the Deadline to non-English-speaking bloggers.
After the Deadline was first discovered by the Automattic team when WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg saw a comment on Hackernews from After the Deadline's founder discussing how his tool found errors in a New York Times article. He was intrigued and contacted the tool's founder. Just a few months later, After the Deadline is now a part of WordPress.
I've had the opportunity to use After the Deadline on a few occasions. (You can too by inputting content into its demonstration module.) It's one of the most capable error-correction tools I've ever used.
After the Deadline, available now to WordPress users, is free to use.
Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.
The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.
NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.
"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."
Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.
Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.
Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.
MSNBC Interactive News, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal, announced Monday that it has acquired EveryBlock, a start-up that provides hyperlocal news down to the block level. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
EveryBlock received its funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It also won that organization's Knight News Challenge, which awards start-ups that have the most innovative media ideas. When it won that award in 2007, the Knight Foundation required EveryBlock to make its code freely available to the public. Its code is available now on the company's site. MSNBC didn't say if it plans to remove the code or keep the site open source.
MSNBC said in a statement that EveryBlock will stay an independent brand with its own site. The company also said it plans to use its "resources to turn EveryBlock from a cool, useful service into something much bigger." MSNBC didn't elaborate on what it has planned.
EveryBlock's service allows users to input their address or ZIP code to see local news coverage, blog entries, and other information. It might have caught MSNBC's attention after AOL announced earlier this year that it had acquired a competing service, Patch.com. Both sites provide hyperlocal news that they gather from the local community. It's a cost-effective approach with a good chance of generating a positive return.
So far, EveryBlock is available to residents living in Atlanta, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and a handful of other major metro areas. MSNBC didn't say if it plans to expand its coverage, but if I had to guess, I'd say there's a good chance of that happening.
News Corp.-owned MySpace is "close to acquiring" social music service iLike, according to TechCrunch.
The price tag is rumored to be in the neighborhood of $20 million. Representatives from iLike were not immediately available for comment.
The report comes within days of iLike launching a music download store--a development first reported by CNET News--with MP3s available from all four major record labels.
The deal, if confirmed as accurate, highlights the often complicated connections in digital media's elite ranks.
iLike, for example, rose to fame through its close ties to Facebook. The iLike application, since re-branded to simply Music, was one of the first big applications to launch on Facebook's platform at its debut. Its ad-supported streaming music service has become one of the most prominent in a packed field--it now has about 50 million users and just launched a suite of iPhone apps. But the streaming music niche has proven difficult to monetize and has left some players in the space reportedly hunting for an exit.
MySpace, meanwhile, has seen stagnant growth as the once-far-smaller Facebook has rapidly overtaken it in the social-networking race, thanks in part to the proliferation of third-party apps like iLike on Facebook's groundbreaking developer platform. As part of an executive restructuring earlier this year, MySpace installed former Facebook chief operating officer Owen Van Natta as its CEO, replacing co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Attempting to refocus and return to its roots as a hub for music and pop culture, MySpace launched its own streaming music service, called MySpace Music, and hired MTV veteran Courtney Holt to run the division. MySpace Music, a joint venture with the record labels, does not operate its own download store but instead directs users to Amazon MP3 downloads through affiliate links. But MySpace Music hasn't received thoroughly positive reviews from the record labels hoping to profit from it.
Disclosure: CNET News is part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes Last.fm, a competitor to iLike.
Updated at 7:38 a.m. PDT with additional details and background.
Monday's news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product." But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.
What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed's killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn't have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?
Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn't) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you've made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook's search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.
FriendFeed's search is real time, and content-centric. Something similar for Facebook could yield good results.
(Credit: CNET)Real real time. FriendFeed's real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed's way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause--something Facebook could soon adopt.
Content aggregation. Facebook's "highlights" section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they've liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed's solution is to create a "best of the day" which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.
IM integration. I've knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but... Read more
Surprise! Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.
"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."
TechCrunch reported the news on Monday, a matter of minutes before Facebook confirmed the acquisition.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.
Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it's not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point. Facebook acquired it for its talent; prior to FriendFeed, Taylor was part of the team that helped launch Google Maps. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don't know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers. FriendFeed's co-founders "will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams," according to the release, and the rest of the company's 12 employees will also join Facebook.
This would also be consistent with Facebook's minimal past acquisition history: the company bought little-known start-up Parakey two years ago with the primary objective of getting its founders, the creators of the Firefox browser, on board. It's also well-known that Facebook tried hard to acquire Twitter--which would've been a far more significant acquisition than FriendFeed--and was turned down. (Well, there was also ConnectU, whose assets Facebook acquired pretty much just to get that pesky lawsuit off the table.)
The release from Facebook repeatedly hinted that this is about talent more than product.
"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the statement. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."
Yup.
"As we spent time with Mark (Zuckerberg) and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built, and their desire to have us contribute to it," FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, another ex-Googler who was instrumental in building Gmail, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, groundbreaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."
But Facebook director of product Christopher Cox said to CNET News later, "I wouldn't call it a talent acquisition." He elaborated, "We really have a vision that's focusing on Facebook being not just a destination but being a service...We think FriendFeed's been focused on how that's going to work in an open way, and that's something we're excited about, not just the people but the product they've built."
FriendFeed earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley--most notably Robert Scoble--but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social-networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream. But Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates.
Bret Taylor said that FriendFeed wasn't shopping itself around. "We weren't up for sale. We had a healthy amount of financing and a really efficient company," he told CNET News. "As we noticed our products were really converging in terms of product vision, we started having casual conversations with Facebook."
It's not clear what will happen to the FriendFeed service, because it sure sounds like Facebook is eager to get its team onto the engineering fast track. "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," a post by Taylor on the FriendFeed blog read. "We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team."
Taylor elaborated more to CNET News later on Monday: "Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down. I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends...We absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down."
More to come...last updated at 2:04 p.m. PDT.
Nokia has signed an agreement to acquire Cellity, a small German company that creates social-network contact management and address book aggregation services for mobile devices.
Cellity's 14 workers will become Nokia employees. But the service will be shut down and existing user accounts will not be transferred to Nokia.
Cellity, which was founded less than three years ago, is based in Hamburg.
Terms of the deal have not been made public. The acquisition is expected to close in the current quarter.
Acquiring small start-ups is nothing new for Nokia. It acquired Plazes last year while the locator start-up was still in private beta, for example. The mobile conglomerate also has a history of willingness to rebrand. After acquiring a media-sharing site called Twango several years ago, Nokia ditched the start-up's moniker and folded it into a new software division called Ovi.
