GiftCards.com Agrees To Buy Giftly To Grow A Mobile Platform
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburg-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock. Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They came out with a native mobile app last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family. The company’s platform didn’t put ...
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Scale Out Provider Cloudscaling Raises $10M With Investment From Juniper And Seagate, Networking Takes Center Stage
Cloudscaling has raised $10 million from Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks, and Seagate Technologies in a deal that shows how software defined networking has become a focal issue for companies building out their own clouds. Cloudscaling delivers an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system for enterprises, SaaS providers and cloud service providers. The company foreshadowed a deal with Juniper when it announced the company would provide Cloudscaling with its virtualized networking controller. That deal was precipitated by Juniper’s acquisition of Contrail Systems. The startup raised $10 million last July from Khosla Ventures. By December, Juniper had snatched up the company for $176 million. Network controllers have become a hot topic as more cloud projects get underway. The importance stems from the need to scale out networks in an affordable manner. Adding more hardware just gets too expensive. Virtualizing the controller means that the data flowing through the pipes can be managed ...
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Sprint Acquires KC-Based Handmark For Its Mobile App Development And Advertising Shop, OneLouder
Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically. Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t been made known, but it’s a huge win for the Kansas City tech space, a place that I visited just a few weeks ago. Sprint hopes that this acquisition will bring a more “entrepreneurial spirit” to its mobile program, hoping to lure developers to use its own advertising platform. Mike Cooley, VP of New Ventures at Sprint shared: “The business, culture and technology they bring will be a huge asset to our business, and ultimately the customers of Pinsight Media+.” Through building all of its apps, OneLouder found a niche in advertising, having its own team that has worked on the ad platform and ...
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Salesforce Acquires Evernote-Like Web Clipping Service Clipboard For Double-Digit Millions, Service Shut Down In June
Clipboard, the web clipping service which operated as something of a cross between Evernote and Pinterest, has been acquired by Salesforce. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we’re hearing that it was mostly cash, and that the final figure was in the “double digit millions.” The startup had previously raised $2.5 million from a “who’s who” of high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel, Betaworks, DFJ, First Round and others. Founded in 2011 by Gary Flake, Clipboard’s vision was to help users snip and save web content using simple online tools. That content could then be organized into “boards,” where those items could be annotated and shared, or collaborated on with others. Given the similarities to existing services like Pinterest and Evernote, both with huge traction themselves, Clipboard had yet to find a substantially sized audience for its service. Prior to the acquisition, the company had grown to around 100,000 ...
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Yahoo Acquires Mobile Social Polling Tool GoPollGo; Shuts Down Services
GoPollGo, a real-time polling tool that lets brands and media properties collect and analyse feedback, has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo. The news comes just one week after the search giant announced the acquisition of mobile personal organization app Astrid, as part of its ongoing acquisition spree: it comes at the same time that Yahoo has confirmed the acquisition of travel site Milewise. For now, GoPollGo says that it will be shutting down its services on its site, as well as its embeddable widgets and mobile app. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. While Milewise is joining Yahoo’s operations in New York, GoPollGo will be at its Sunnyvale HQ. “Today Milewise and GoPollGo joined the Yahoo! mobile team. GoPollGo created a cool social polling app and the team has joined our mobile org in Sunnyvale,” Yahoo told us in an emailed statement on the two deals. “Milewise created a great app to make travel planning easier and personalized. They have joined our New York ...
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