The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

RelayRides is a peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace where people can offer their cars for daily or weekly rentals. Wheelz adopted a similar model as well as proprietary DriveBox technology that facilitates keyless access to cars. With this acquisition, RelayRides will absorb Wheelz and its marketplace, technology, and several “key people” from the Wheelz team.

“RelayRides has been growing rapidly and we are confident that this acquisition will turbo-charge our growth,” said RelayRides director of communications Steve Webb to VentureBeat. “We are going to be better positioned to extend the benefits of peer-to-peer car sharing to more people across the U.S. This acquisition demonstrates that the peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace is maturing and consolidating. As an industry matures, consolidation follows, and the peer-to-peer car sharing industry is no exception. We are witnessing the evolution and maturation of an exciting space.”

Webb said that RelayRides and Wheelz share the goal of having a car within a 10-minute walk for at least 100 million Americans by the end of 2015. Instead of owning a car or renting one from an agency, people can turn to services like RelayRides for a more personal and affordable mode of transportation. Each car on the site has a profile with information about its features, ratings and reviews, and owner bio. All drivers are screened, and RelayRides provides insurance on the rentals, so drivers don’t have to worry about damages.

RelayRides and Wheelz are part of a trend surrounding “the rise of disownership.” Consumer attitudes and behaviors surrounding renting, borrowing, and leasing items, versus ownership, are shifting across the country. People are increasingly engaging in disownership by putting their under-used property to work. Internet startups facilitated this movement by adopting ‘shared economy’ or ‘collaborative consumption’ models that connect people with available assets to people who need them. AirBnB did this for homes, TaskRabbit for services, but the transportation space is still a dynamic and crowded area. Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar can be used instead of taxis, and RelayRides is providing an alternative to traditional rental agencies. It mainly competes with Zipcar and Getaround.

Since launching in 2012, RelayRides added tens of thousands of members into its marketplace and thousands of postings for cars. Webb said rental reassertion hours increased by 500 percent and April was the company’s best month yet in terms of revenue and new members added. By scooping up Wheelz, RelayRides will expand its marketplace.

RelayRides has raised $13 million in venture capital. In 2012, it teamed up with General Motors so that 6 million of GM’s OnStar subscribers could rent out their cars using RelayRides. Wheelz had raised a total of $15.7 million and includes Zipcar has an investor. Both companies are headquartered in San Francisco.

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Photo Credit:  Darryl W. Moran Photography

Clipboard, a company that had focused on digital archiving, has been acquired by Salesforce, its founders have stated on the company site. Its product will be shut down on June 30.

Explaining the shutter-slamming, Clipboard said further, “We came to the conclusion that it was essential to focus on a singular platform for building new capabilities within Salesforce, which is not something that we could do while keeping Clipboard operating.”

Clipboard was founded in 2011 and was based in Bellevue, Wash. The service itself, however, didn’t make its public debut until almost exactly one year ago.

At that time, we noted that while visually identical to Pinterest, Clipboard was different because users could bookmark text, audio, animations, and fully formatted sections of webpages with links intact as well as simple images. Like Pinterest, the service included public/private options as well as a following/follower social model.

At Salesforce’s Seattle office, Clipboard CEO Dr. Gary Flake will become Salesforce’s newest engineering VP, and the rest of Clipboard’s core engineering and design team will continue to work under Flake.

While the exact terms of the deal are unknown, rumor pegs the price around $10 million or $20 million. Clipboard had previously raised around $2.5 million in seed funding.

Image credit: hownowdesign/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

File-sharing company Box acquired Crocodoc today because your documents are boring and no one wants to read them. Crocodoc’s technology can turn them into interactive experiences using HTML5.

Box announced the acquisition today, but declined to reveal the terms of the deal. Chief executive Aaron Levie did say that the deal was a cash-and-stock transaction and that all of Crocodoc’s employees will be absorbed into Box. Crocodoc founder Ryan Damico will join Box as director of platform.

Crocodoc, once a Y Combinator company, was born in 2007 to make documents are more enjoyable experience. Many people feel that text documents are boring, even if you layer on as many PowerPoint transitions as possible. Using Crocodoc, you can turn your documents into carousels, flip-books, and more.

The company first started working in Flash to take elements of a document and make them more pleasing to the eye and interactive. But it quickly moved on to HTML5 as soon as the technology was available. Indeed, Crocodoc only complete its transition to HTML5 within the last few days.

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Ryan Damico, founder, Crocodoc

“Things like document experiences haven’t really been modernized, they’re still very clunky, very cumbersome,” said Levie at the announcement today. “You think about what viewing videos looked like in 2005 before Youtube videos came around. You had to have all these different plugins and players just to view a video somebody sent you. We see the same sort of experience required for documents today.”

Box assures Crocodoc’s customers that, for the time being, the service will continue to run as normal. This means it will continue to work with Box competitor Dropbox. The technology will also be integrated into Box’s existing products and some form of rebranding will happen in the coming months.

The conversation often turned toward bringing “consumer-grade” products into the enterprise. This type of attitude seems to be flowing throughout Silicon Valley — the idea that consumer-grade apps are more beautiful, usable, well-built than enterprise-grade apps, which are characterized as clunky and outdated.

“It’s very consumer-grade design … I think that’s really the standard that you have to shoot for now,” said Box’s vice president of engineering Sam Schillace at the announcement. “Documents kind of seem boring. … We’ve had them for 20 years, but they are undergoing this interesting evolution.”

Damico told me that he is particularly excited to start building out new use cases for the healthcare industry, which could certainly use some consumer-grade love. This might include turning research papers into more-digestible flipbooks, or turning medical images into HTML5-based interactive documents in some way.

Damico may also tackle electronic health records — a massive market opportunity, given that so many healthcare institutions find them cumbersome, hard to read, and slow. A different presentation of a patient’s medical history might make all the difference. (For more on electronic health records, check out VentureBeat’s upcoming HealthBeat conference, May 20-21 — it’s one of the event’s major themes.)

Security, of course, is at the top of the priorities list when it comes to any health-related documents. Box recently received HIPAA compliance, which opens the doors for Crocodoc, which otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve that security itself.

Ryan Damico and Aaron Levie images via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Microsoft already owns a piece of Nook, having invested $300 million into the business in April 2012. According to the report, Microsoft would buy the digital operation, which includes e-books, movies, TV, comics, apps, and more.

The interesting wrinkle is that Nook is built on Android — which Microsoft makes money charging licenses for – and just opened up its business to Google, signing an agreement with Google to get Google Play and inviting the entire Google mobile stack — Gmail, Chrome, YouTube, and Google Maps — onto the platform. In addition, Nook offers apps on mobile platforms that compete with Microsoft: Android and iOS.

Which would put Microsoft in the awkward position of owning an Android-based tablet that, while not extremely successful, has sold more devices than Microsoft has sold of its own Windows 8-based tablets.

About ten million Nook devices have been sold to date.

But Nook may be phasing out hardware and moving simply to delivering content via apps on other company’s hardware platforms as both revenue and device sales have slowed in recent quarters. In which case, Microsoft would be buying digital content and licenses to digital content that could be valuable assets for both Windows 8-based tablets and its Xbox living-room-entertainment-hub ambitions.

Whether that’s worth a billion dollars, however, is anyone’s guess.

Which means that the bigger question is whether buying a declining device and content distributor from an ailing company that is failing to successfully compete with Amazon is a smart business idea. With Nook division revenue declining more than $100 million in 2013 and a projected loss of $360 million, it could just be the case of Microsoft adopting yet another expensive albatross for its cash cow office, operating system, and business software divisions to support.

Trulia is one of the leading marketplaces for real estate online. Five million homes are listed on the site and potential buyers can search, visualize, and track properties as well as access information about nearby schools and crime. The site attracts 31 million monhtly unique visitors. Trulia filed for a $75 million IPO in August 2012 to keep pace with its primary competitor Zillow, which went public in 2011.

Trulia’s former strategy was to “build first” and avoid acquisitions. According to the company’s vice president of communications Ken Shuman “most acquisitions fail and tend to be a distraction for senior management.” However, in March 2013, Trulia announced that it intended to raise $150 million to move quickly on acquisitions.

“The capital is to really to strengthen the cash reserves for new product lines and acquisitions,” Shuman said in an interview with VentureBeat. “There has to be a really compelling reason to acquire, as we’re often better off building.”

The corporate development team looked for potential buys amongst companies that provide tools and services for real estate agents, online rentals, mortgage-focused startups, and small companies that could support international expansion.

Market Leader provides a suite of software solutions that real estate professionals use to manage their business online. Products include a website-builder, tools for lead generation tools and marketing, and contact management. The combined marketplace will have 46,000 premium subscribers, which the company said is more than any other online real estate marketplace. This deal means Trulia can provide an “end-to-end solution” for these professionals.

In a statement issued the morning, Trulia’s CEO Pete Flint said that acquiring Market Leader will “create unprecedented value for our customer base” and the combined platform will “enhance the productivity of their agents.” Trulia will also benefit from Market Leader’s partnerships with franchisors and brokerages

Trulia’s foray into the realm of enterprise software could be a step towards profitability. The company has a “history of losses” and Market Leader’s revenue stream grew by more than 30% in 2012, marking its second year of consecutive growth. Rather than relying on accurate listings to attract subscribers, Trulia will be able to offer additional value to agents so they have a one-stop shop for their operations.

Trulia’s stock closed at $34.34 yesterday and Market Leader’s shareholders will receive $6 and .1553 shares of Trulia’s common stock for each share of Market Leader common stock. Trulia is headquartered in San Francisco and Market Leader will continue to work out of its offices in Kirkland, Washington as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trulia.

NetSuite, the cloud financial software company, has just told the world its latest good news: It has acquired OrderMotion, another cloud company that specializes in order management.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We focus on the order at NetSuite,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson in a recent VentureBeat interview. “Order management is at the heart of our transactions. … The transaction at the center of the business process is defining big winners.”

Of course, NetSuite already has its own order management system, but in a statement on the news, the company said it was a “important and complex business challenge” requiring outside augmentation to meet their customers’ needs, which range from e-commerce to brick-and-mortar retail to telemarketing.

NetSuite will be using OrderMotion’s technology for continuity and replenishment, as well as supporting direct response marketing efforts. The resulting product, the companies say, will be useful for almost every kind of business, from B2B, B2C, and retail use cases to wholesale distribution and manufacturing.

Order management is a great compliment to NetSuite’s commerce-as-a-service platform, which it launched last year to help any kind of company attain Amazonian online retail goals.

“We’re transforming how your business operates and how your business interacts with other businesses,” said Nelson at that time. “Customers want to transact with several different devices and they want you to remember them across devices.”

Image credit: nadja_robot/Flickr

Wefollow, a directory that sorts and scores people based on their social media profiles and declared interests, has been acquired by About.me.

Wefollow was co-founded in 2009 by Kevin Rose, an About.me investor — a fact About.me co-founder Tony Conrad (pictured above) calls “perfect continuity.” We have other words for it. Wefollow’s other founder is Jeff Hodsdon, a longtime Rose collaborator from his Digg days.

About.me co-founders Ryan Freitas and Conrad wrote today on the company blog, “As About.me continues to grow, it’s increasingly important that we simplify the way users discover people on the About.me platform. Discovery has quickly become one of the most popular uses of About.me and represents a significant opportunity for us to further evolve our platform.”

The pair continued to state that Wefollow’s Klout-like scores for individuals’ areas of expertise will be used in About.me’s search algorithms. The Wefollow brand will eventually disappear entirely.

Wefollow uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram data to score its users on a 100-point scale based on their perceived relevance and/or expertise in a given field. For example, Jimmy Fallon scores 99 for the term “comedy” and 100 for the term “actor.”

Fjord, the high-end design firm, has been scooped up by Accenture for an undisclosed sum.

The news was announced today on the company blog. CEO Olof Schybergson writes that the team is excited by the opportunity to work at one of the largest global consulting firms. “It’s almost like graduation day: proud of what I’d achieved, emotional about the past, and facing a new world of possibilities.”

Fjord counts Nokia, Citibank, Harvard Medical School, and PayPal among its clients (the firm was responsible for the redesign of Nokia.com).

The firm’s chief client officer Mark Curtis once remarked that design is sparking a similar revolution to marketing just a few decades ago. “We’re beginning to see the very best products marketing themselves through design,” he said on stage at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit in April.

Fjord’s 200 or so employees will make the jump, and will join Accenture Interactive, the consulting giant’s design and marketing wing.

This is the latest in a series of acquisitions of design studios: Jawbone has added design talent to its team by acquiring Visere, and Google bought husband-and-wife creative studio Mike & Maaike last year.

Top image from a Fjord company retreat via the Fjord blog

Botched corporate takeover? What botched corporate takeover?

Dell today announced the acquisition of Enstratius, the Minneapolis-based cloud infrastructure management solution provider, for an undisclosed amount.

Enstratius enables users to deploy and manage enterprise-class applications across private, public and hybrid clouds.

“As enterprises increase their use of public, private, and hybrid clouds, the need for controls, security, governance, and automation becomes more critical,” said Tom Kendra, vice president and general manager of systems management at Dell Software, in a statement on the news.

The acquisition is expected to further enhance Dell’s end-to-end solutions strategy.

“Dell, together with Enstratius, is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated, complete cloud-management solutions to enterprise customers large and small, empowering them with the efficiency and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources,” added Kendra.

At a recent press event, executives from Dell introduced its new software group to members of the media, and talks revolved around big data and cloud software products.

“Dell wants to be an end-to-end solutions provider, a one stop shop,” said Carol Fawcett, the chief information officer for the group, in an interview. “But we don’t want to be another Oracle.”

Talking of the acquisition, David Bagley, chief executive of Enstratius said in a statement, “We are excited to join the Dell team and bring our expertise to Dell’s rapidly growing cloud-management capabilities.”

Enstratius was founded in 2009, and had raised $3.5 million in venture capital from El Dorado Ventures and Vesbridge Partners in 2011.

Image Credit: 401(K) 2013/ Flickr

Astrid announced the acquisition itself on its blog, saying that “we are thrilled to announce” that the company has been bought by Yahoo.

Users of Astrid might possibly be less than thrilled, however, as the service will only be maintained as it currently exists for 90 days, after which changes might be made. Users, however, will be able to download any data they have input into the service, if they wish.

CEO Jon Paris thanked Google Ventures and Startup Lab as well as investors Nexus Venture Partners and TMT Investments, but said that Astrid will no longer be accepting premium subscriptions. Users who have paid for annual subscriptions that overlap that period will be getting refunds.

With the purchase, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer continues to deliver on her promise of more mobile and more acquisitions. Yahoo has also recently acquired mobile video platform OnTheAir, social curation site Snip.it, location discovery app Alike, and mobile recommendations site Jybe.

Paris’ entire statement:

Friends of Astrid,

We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo!. When we set out to build Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive. We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.”

Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions. To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.

We are grateful to the more than 4 million of you who have downloaded our apps, to those who have shared Astrid with friends, family and co-workers, and to all who encouraged us with your kind words along the way. You honored us in so many ways, and we won’t forget you.

We are also grateful to our many mentors and investors:

• Thomas Korte and AngelPad for your sage advice and assembling a tremendous community of entrepreneurs.
• Google Ventures and the team at the Startup Lab for teaching us so much.
• Nexus Venture Partners, TMT Investments, and the amazing angel investors who provided the resource and support we needed to build our products and company.
• Jump Associates and LUXr for helping us understand our users and build products people love.

To all of you, in both big and small ways you have helped us achieve the success we enjoy today. It is our sincere hope that our work will help you come closer to your own dreams.

Warmly,

Jon Paris & the Astrid Team

*Note: Yahoo! will be administering refunds to eligible users who have paid for annual subscriptions, Power-Pack and Locale Plugins.

Hat tip: The Next Web

The deal will bring 50 NexGen employees into Fusion-io to help the company expand its products and market in the small and medium-sized business space with data storage solutions that provide the speed and reliability of all-flash solutions, while still participating in some of the cost efficiencies of tradition disk memory.

The two companies had already partnered on storage solutions.

“Many SME businesses have lean IT teams and budgets, making it critical to offer an integrated and affordable entry point for flash powered application acceleration that delivers consistent performance, even under demanding workloads,” David Flynn, Fusion-io chief executive said in a statement.  “The hybrid NexGen solution combines memory attached flash and disk on leading server platforms to provide a system tuned to deliver performance, price, and capacity.”

Fusion-io had just reported earnings earlier today, announcing $87.7 million in quarterly revenue with a net loss of $20 million, and a drop from last quarter of 27 percent and from the previous year’s quarter of seven percent.

But the company has plenty of coin on hand for the acquisition: $355 million in cash and equivalents.

With Fusion-io’s software and NexGen’s hardware, Fusion-io says that it will now provide:

• independently provisionable performance and capacity with a software-defined architecture
• dynamic real-time flash write caching, read caching, and tiering
• enterprise reliability with more than 250 times more data written over the system’s lifetime than SATA and SAS SSDs
• application performance three times faster than SSDs integrated behind legacy storage controllers
• transparent movement of data between high performance and low cost storage media as needed

As part of the deal, Fusion-io is covering all existing stock agreements and vested equity of NexGen employees.

photo credit: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin

Travel startup GetYourGuide announced today the purchase of Gidsy, an online community that connected local experts to people looking for unique experiences.

Gidsy came into being after the founders couldn’t find a guide for a wild mushroom hunt to make risotto. The platform started in Berlin and within a year expanded into 140 cities around the world. GetYourGuide is a website that helps people search for, find, and book tours, attractions and activities. The company collects and indexes tours, along with ratings, cost and customer reviews. There are currently 19,700 activities on the database in more than 1,930 destinations around the world.

“We have been in close contact with Gidsy over the past 2 years as we are both based in Berlin and GetYourGuide actually  started in the peer-to-peer space, meaning we totally sympathized for the problem Gidsy tried to solve,” said CEO Johannes Reck in an email. “In fact we advised them on numerous occasions. Over time, it became clear though that we are much stronger with joined forces addressing the B2C activities market and then venturing out into the longtail over time, than building two separate product offerings.”

In January 2013, GetYourGuide raised $14 million from Spark Capital and Highland Capital to expand its database of things to do and enter new markets. The Zurich-based company previously focused on professional tours, rather than peer-to-peer sharing. By acquiring Gidsy, GetYourGuide will expand its offering with marketplace of experiences and build out the mobile platform. On the flip side, people who acted as guides on Gidsy will have access to GetYourGuide’s resources, which include marketing and advertising services, as well as organizational, translation, analytic, and optimization tools and a network of strategic partners that includes 1,500 online travel agencies, operators, and media companies.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Gidsy’s team of twelve will join GetYourGuide and Gidsy’s cofounders Edial and Floris Dekker will become the head of mobile development and head of design, respectively. Gidsy will no longer exist. The startup received buzz back in January 2012 raising a $1.2 million seed round led by Sunstone Capital, with participation from Index Ventures, Werner Vogels, Peter Read and Ashton Kutcher.

Photo Credit: Latin America for Less/Flickr

Dell has been dodging a takeover for months now, but the latest interested buyer, Blackstone Group, has just backed away from the table due to the PC industry’s rather grim outlook.

The pullout was confirmed by a letter from Blackstone to Dell and other parties with a stake in the deal that rescinded the bid due to lagging PC sales and Dell’s own financial slide.

For the first quarter of 2013, PC shipments went down the proverbial toilet. Sales posted a 13.9 percent drop globally — the industry’s largest ever decrease in new PC shipments.

Now, sources for a Reuters story as well as official documents from BlackStone are saying that bit of information caused Blackstone to sour on the idea of purchasing a PC maker.

For some time now, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell [above] has sought to take his company private in a huge $24.4 billion deal. But Blackstone and investor Carl Icahn opposed the deal, saying it undervalued the company, and were preparing to counter it.

Icahn offered $15 per share for up to 58 percent of Dell; showing broader scope but less value per share, Blackstone had said it would be willing to pay around $14.25 per share for 100 percent of Dell’s stock. Now that last week’s PC downfall means Blackstone’s offer no longer stands, the way has been paved for a Michael Dell-Carl Icahn showdown.

Dell stock is trading down 3.7 percent at $13.43 as of this writing.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

WhatsApp is fifth in the app store for monthly revenue. Fifth on Google Play for downloads, and seventh on Google Play for revenue. And it’s the second-most-downloaded app on Google Play.

Impressive? Sure. But a billion dollars impressive? Hard to say.

That’s the question as rumors continue to swirl of a potential Google acquisition in the billion-dollar range. According to Digital Trends, the acquisition talk has been ongoing for a month, and WhatsApp execs want more. Perhaps, I’m thinking they should recall what happened last time Google offered a company billions of dollars.

Groupon, anyone?

WhatsApp is a cross-platform mobile messaging app: It sends messages to anyone on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone via an iMessage-like network. The messages use your data plan, not text, and require that both sender and receiver have WhatsApp, which, of course, makes the service inherently viral. Perhaps 300 million WhatsApp users send hundreds of billions of messages daily.

Industry insiders I’ve spoken to don’t put a ton of credence in the acquisition rumors. My question is: WhatsApp is hot — there’s no doubt about it — but is being one of the top revenue-producing apps on the app store or Google Play worth a billion dollars?

Google already has many messaging apps and services currently, such as Talk, Messenger, and Hangouts. Too many, in fact, which don’t integrate or connect. Based on some leaks and screenshots, Google appears to be working on a unification of its communications platforms, called Babel. Adding yet another SMS-style communications app to its stable wouldn’t appear to simplify the situation.

In addition, Google has shown an impressive capability to create great apps and distribute to enormous audiences.

In February, ComScore’s Digital Future report said that Google has five of the top six apps in America on any platform. Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube took positions two through six on a combined Google Play/iOS app store downloads list. And Google’s YouTube and Google Maps have been swapping top spot on the iOS-only download charts for months.

Which means that when and if Google decides to create and release a unified messaging platform for both iOS, Android, web, and Windows Phone, it could very well do so on its own and become very successful.

The thing that WhatsApp does have going for it, of course, is those hundreds of millions of users. That’s what Arjun Sethi, the founder of WhatsApp competitor MessageMe told VentureBeat today:

“At the end of the day, they’re valuable because they have a massive userbase.”

Others, like Hille Fuld, the senior evangelist for app monetization platform InnerActive, agree that a high valuation is warranted:

@johnkoetsier I’d say so, yes. Technology: check. Users: check. Retention: check. It’s a great success story.

— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) April 8, 2013

The massive userbase worked, famously, for Instagram, which didn’t even have a revenue model when it was acquired by Facebook for what turned out to be a little under a billion dollars in post-IPO money. Instagram had about 30 million members at the time, which has now grown to over 100 million.

I just wonder if it’s billion-dollars valuable, when Google has shown the capability to grow its only solutions in-house.

When asked, a Google representative said only that “we don’t comment on rumors and speculations.”

Image credit: ShutterStock/Billion dollars

Sources are telling us that WellDoc, a startup that provides chronic disease management solutions, has found a buyer.

Elite health incubator Rock Health substantiated the rumor that WellDoc has been shopping for an acquirer in a blog post.

Last we heard from WellDoc in August 2012, the company announced its intent to raise $10 million in funding. An SEC filing revealed that the company secured $500,000, so funding may be drying up (unless there is something we’ve missed.)

Among the potential buyers, one source suggested that healthcare management giant Alere is interested, given that they inked a deal to market WellDoc’s diabetes tracker.

A spokesperson from WellDoc declined to comment on the acquisition.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

U.S. regulators may gum up the works in the proposed acquisition of Sprint by Softbank with requests to approve network hardware deals. Said hardware could bring Chinese spyware into play in U.S. networks, they fear.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that several sources close to the deal say feds might ask for oversight on network equipment purchases. Softbank will also be asked to comply with future U.S. government requests any time national security questions come up, the sources said.

The Sprint/Softbank deal is worth $20 billion and first came to our attention last fall. Sprint confirmed that it’s selling 70 percent of the company to Japan’s Softbank for $20.1 billion. As part of the deal, $12.1 billion will be paid out to Sprint’s existing stockholders, while the remaining $8 billion will be new capital for the carrier. The cash infusion should help Sprint with debt management and is expected to close in the middle of 2013.

China itself has become a hot topic for technologists. First, it was the widespread banning of online content for web users in the PRC and the IP violations in copycat hardware and software. Then, it was the string of high-profile hacking attempts launched by the Chinese government and ongoing back-and-forth snipes between the country and Apple.

But it’s the cyberwarfare that has the U.S. government so concerned right now. Just last week, U.S. national security adviser Tom Donilon said the U.S. needs three things from China: a recognition of how serious the current cybercrime situation is, action from Beijing to stop the attacks, and a chance to create “acceptable norms of behavior” in online business.

“Increasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,” said Donilon.

“From the President on down, this has become a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our governments.”

Those concerns are evident in today’s news, as well. While the government can’t interfere with free trade by, say, blocking hardware purchases from specific, Chinese vendors, officials can demand enough oversight to make such purchases very difficult and ultimately not worth it from a business perspective.

Image credit: ivanwalsh/Flickr

As if Apple’s push to get all your data into the cloud weren’t enough, the company now wants to find out exactly where you are while indoors, according to its latest acquisition.

Apple has recently purchased indoor-GPS location service WifiSlam for a cool $20 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report today. While Apple did confirm the purchase of the company, it didn’t comment on the sale price, which WSJ learned from an anonymous source familiar with the deal.

Founded in 2010 by former Google engineering intern Joseph Huang and Jessica Tsoong, WifiSlam develops technology that allows mobile apps to find a person’s exact location inside a building by using Wi-Fi signals. Such tech has been alluring to brick-and-mortar retail organizations that want more location-based data on customers as they browse a store, not to mention museums, malls, and convention centers. VentureBeat first reported on WifiSlam way back in August when the company debuted its technology.

Apple’s purchase isn’t all that surprising, as the company’s location-based services are severely lacking. The company was widely ridiculed when it decided to ditch Google Maps last year in favor of its own native map application for the iPhone. The native app was so bad it caused Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue a public apology as well as launch a marketing effort to push iPhone owners to better third-party mapping apps.

Just five days after the $500 million deal closed, Zipcars are showing up at New York regional airports. Skift reported this morning that the Avis Car Rental pick-up facilities at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark now house a handful of Zipcars, available at rates ranging from $12 per hour to $89 per day.

“The availability of Zipcars at airports will provide increased options for members who may not need a full day rental car, or for those who need to travel somewhere not easily accessible by public transit,” Zipcar president Mark Norman said. “We believe this is the first in many new offerings that will enhance the value of Zipcar membership that we can provide thanks to the support of the Avis Budget Group.”

This small expansion to airports is just the beginning. Norman said Zipcars will be available in additional airport locations over the course of the year, marking a departure from Zipcar’s traditional placement in cities and college campuses.

Avis and Zipcar announced the deal on January 2nd, but the papers were officially signed on March 15. Within hours, Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith resigned and COO Mark Norman took the job as top dog. Despite Zipcar’s popularity (it was 730,000 members and 1 million customers), the company was never able to turn a profit, losing about $55 million since 2007. The Avis acquisition will help both companies expand their reach and offer greater choice to consumers.  

“By combining with Zipcar, we will significantly increase our growth potential, both in the United States and internationally, and will position our company to better serve a greater variety of consumer and commercial transportation needs,” Avis Budget Group CEO Ronald Nelson said in a statement. “We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company.”

Zipcar now operates as a subsidiary of Avis. Avis said it expects “to generate $50 to $70 million in annual synergies” in relation to the deal.

ZeroTurnaround, an Estonian company with its hands deep in the Java cookie jar, has just bought Javeleon, a tool that lets you instantly see changes to code in a running Java application.

ZeroTurnaround makes JRebel, a tool for Java development. One of JRebel’s features is pretty much exactly what Javeleon does — instantly viewing changes to code.

Javeleon co-founders Dr. Allan Gregersen and Michael Rasmussen will meld into ZeroTurnaround’s Estonian product and engineering teams. The duo founded the company in 2012 based on research done at the technology-focused Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark; sounds like ZeroTurnaround has bought itself one heck of a brain trust.

“We are thrilled to be joining the ZeroTurnaround team and excited to dive right in and help integrate the Javeleon technology with the JRebel product line,” said Dr. Gregersen in a statement on the news.

“We have admired the ZeroTurnaround success story for years, and we believe our involvement will positively impact ZeroTurnaround’s future growth.”

ZeroTurnaround was founded in 2009 and has two locations in Estonia, one in Prague, and a sales and marketing home base in Boston.

Image credit: bluehand/Shutterstock

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File-sharing company Dropbox has acquired Mailbox, the email management app everyone’s been drooling over for the past few weeks all over the Internet.

In a note on the Dropbox company blog, co-founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston wrote that they were as obnoxiously besotted with the idea of the app as the rest of y’all.

“When we discovered Mailbox, we fell in love — it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered,” they wrote.

“After spending time with [Mailbox parent company Orchestra founders] Gentry [Underwood], Scott [Cannon], and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox — to solve life’s hidden problems and re-imagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.”

The Dropbox folks didn’t say how much the barely-even-launched-yet app was worth in dollars and cents for the purposes of this deal, but they did hint they’ll be using their audience to get Mailbox even more distribution than its already ridiculously long line of panting nerds waiting for an invite.

If you’d like to get an idea of what the aforementioned nerds are panting about, here’s a demo clip. Roll ‘em!

Orchestra took a $5 million round of funding late last year from Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and Kapoor Capital, among others. The Mailbox product was first announced mid-December 2013, but a long queue has prevented many eager beavers from actually getting their hands on the app, which is only available now for Gmail and iPhone.

Orchestra was founded in 2011 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Rumors are flying that popular news app Pulse is in acquisition talks and that a veritable who’s who of Silicon Valley tech giants are in the alleged running.

Pulse cofounder Akshay Kothari told us in a past interview, “We have been passionate about the product, and that’s what drives us. … It turns out if you have a focus on the product, the company happens around it.”

We’ve reached out to Kothari and a couple other team members about today’s revelations. So far, a close source to the founding team has told us no such talks were underway as recently as two or three months ago.

And of course, Pulse is likely talking with partners like LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook constantly about content; after all, it is a reader/curation app. Any acquisition rumors may be a result of overblown speculation around these talks.

Or the Pulse founders could be shy about showing their real hand, which could include a splashy buy-out in 2013.

And as far as LinkedIn is concerned, a rep told VentureBeat, “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

The particular rumors and speculation of the day started when AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reported LinkedIn was a prime contender for the deal, although Amazon and Facebook (less likely) may also be interested. Swisher claims that nothing is set in stone but that the talks are “quite serious” with LinkedIn.

Pulse wouldn’t come cheap: The San Francisco-based startup has raised $10 million in venture funding from Redpoint Ventures and Mayfield Fund, among others. For perspective, one of its competitors, Zite, sold for $20 million to CNN in 2011. The team has forged partnerships with the leading publishers, and over 20 million people use its beautifully designed apps.

However, LinkedIn has the cash and is focused on building out its mobile products and personalized news content. The company just reported a stellar fourth quarter after a year of accelerated product innovation. LinkedIn’s 2013 goals include adding new features to its mobile apps (the fastest growing consumer product) and increasing engagement with the content on its homepage.

Since 2010, Pulse’s engineering-heavy team has rolled out a news reading application for the iPhone, Android, and iPad. The company was formed at Stanford University, and the first app proved to be an overnight sensation. In June 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs mentioned the product as one to keep an eye on at the company’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.

Stripe, the mobile payment platform for developers, has just announced its acquisition of three-man app Kickoff.

Kickoff is a desktop Mac app for group chat and task management for teams. The Apple-flavored product looks and feels at home on Mac devices, but its features are pretty duplicative of what Stripe already offers.

Check it out:

But the service itself isn’t really the point. As app designer and Kickoff team member Benjamin De Cock wrote today on his personal blog, he’d been doing freelance work for Stripe for some time.

“As my experience with Stripe evolved, we talked about ways to work together and eventually decided that it made sense for Stripe to acquire Kickoff,” he continued.

Another reason it made sense is Stripe’s lovely Scrooge McDuck-like vault of money. The company took $18 million this time last year and doubled down with an additional $20 million in July. At this point we’re pretty sure they use gold bricks as doorstops.

So, what does an API company do with a team of product designers? We’ll just have to keep an eye on the company’s roll-outs for the rest of the year to find out.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Facebook has just acquired Storylane, a CMS for creating and sharing online content. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but the young company and its newborn baby of a product weren’t the target of the deal — the staff was.

The startup only just launched last fall, but four months on the market was enough for them. The service had amassed around 200,000 total shared stories as of its acquisition and had also launched a read-only iPhone app.

“After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook,” writes Storylane founder Jonathan Gheller in — what else? — a Storylane story.

He said Facebook isn’t taking over the Storylane product, meaning this is a talent acquisition. Users will be able to migrate their content elsewhere soon.

Currently, Storylane’s DBA name, Mixtent, claims 18 employees on LinkedIn. Gheller himself previously founded Fashmatch, which Like.com acquired; he was then a product manager at Like.com until Google acquired it.

So, imagine you’re a startup founder. You’ve been going at it for a year or two, and you think it’s going pretty well.

Trouble is, you’re having a hard time scratching together a much-needed Series B. And you’re not the Andrew Mason type who’s gonna take it public, come hell or high water, and refuse all acquisition offers. Matter of fact, an acquisition offer — even one of a acquihiring or strategic nature — would suit you just fine right about now.

That’s where Exitround comes in. It’s an anonymous and discreet network for founders and larger companies, allowing you to shop around through a relatively private site looking for the right buyers, and allowing interested buyers to find you, all without exposing your shame (or whatever you want to call it) to the prying eyes of the wider Internet.

At what point, though, do we just admit that there are simply too many startups run and staffed by people who would be better served (and would serve the community better) as just normal people with day jobs? After all, a semi-failed startup that gets a strategic acquisition is a long, expensive road to a desk job anyway, isn’t it?

We posed this question to one Jacob Mullins, Exitround’s founder, via email last night. He replied, “Actually, my interest behind Exitround is not trying to increase the number of acquisitions that may or may not happen.

“Rather, my interest for it is to be an additional tool for startup founders as they consider their options for the next stage of their business. Their urgent need to do something, combined with the starvation for talent most growing tech companies are experiencing, seems to be a close divide that could be bridged by a product like this.”

Mullins is also a Shasta Ventures VC who previously worked at Microsoft and, way back in the mists of time (2007), put in a ten-month biz dev stint at VentureBeat. Mullins will continue working at Shasta and is careful to note that his VC work and his overseeing an acquisitions networking site will remain separate.

In addition to providing founders and buyers with a hookup solicitation platform, Exitround will also serve as an in-depth PSA about the dangers (and benefits) of early-stage acquisitions.

“There are resources ad nauseam teaching entrepreneurs how to fundraise, but there is very little information about the process, expectations, and potential outcomes of early stage tech startup acquisitions,” reads a post from Mullins on the new company’s blog.

“Exitround will pull the covers off of this entire process through both online and offline content that will help educate founders on what to expect.”

He continues to write that as a VC, he has the unenviable task of turning down Series A seekers. He also has to try to help his own companies who have recruitment problems — a common enough issue given the current hiring climate for tech companies.

“When actually there are some incredibly smart people sitting across the table from me every day who could be a perfect addition to these teams.

“I’m trying to connect those dots, and in this case, those people, for the betterment of the employees, the investors, and the founders.”

Image credit: Tom Wang/Shutterstock

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Updated at 4:30 p.m. Pacific with appMobi’s response.

Intel has acquired appMobi, a company whose tools help mobile app developers work with HTML5.

Billed as an “HTML5 development ecosystem,” this small startup based in Lancaster, Penn., offers a number of solutions for companies looking to build mobile applications that run in the browser, including features like user authentication, “touch to buy,” push notifications, user analytics, and on-device app updates.

ReadWriteWeb, which named appMobi “the most promising company of 2012,“ reported that Intel “has gutted” the firm to acquire its tools and staff in an effort to build its own suite of developer tools for mobile apps, turning appMobi into a “pure-play cloud services provider, offering developers backend service support for HTML5 mobile applications.”

In a response, appMobi, released more information about the deal and said that “appMobi is very much alive and kicking coming out of this transaction.” Intel has acquired the HTML5 developer tools and build system and hired the tools-related technical staff, but appMobi will continue as a “strong, high growth company, operating its existing mobile app cloud services business.”

Intel will now own and manage the HTML5 development tools, and appMobi will focus on “delivering cross platform solutions for mobile app engagement and monetization on all platforms.”

Photo Credit: USACEpublicaffairs/Flickr

This is a guest post by Reed Taussig

Virtually all tech acquisitions are characterized by large companies buying small companies, often for cash. But why does this have to be the case? Why can’t small companies also participate in this bonanza of great technology destined for the trash heap?  They can, but first all of the interested parties have to change their thinking.

Acquisitions: the exit of choice

In 2012, there were 39 tech company IPOs and 2,277 private tech acquisitions. Yet it is widely estimated that in 2013, more than 1,000 angel funded startups will fail to secure the necessary venture funding needed to continue operations and will be forced to close their doors.

Acquisitions have become the de-facto exit of choice in Silicon Valley. In fact, many angel funded startups formulate their entire business model around the hopes of being acquired.

They often plan their development strategy around attracting the attention of one of the usual suspects, such as Apple, Google, IBM or Cisco, and hope for a quick acquisition. This happens often enough to reinforce the behavior, making it a dangerous cycle.

Similarly, it is a misconception that most tech acquisitions make the company founders and investors rich. Many acquisitions are actually the result of a company failing to secure adequate funding to continue operations, forcing the startup to either close its doors or, for the more fortunate, sell the business to a larger company.  These transactions typically take the form of asset sales to larger businesses looking to acquire much needed technology at very attractive prices. The founders are then rewarded with some stability, and the opportunity to continue building the angel funded technology that they are so passionately committed to.

Typically, the investors are not so fortunate.

How about partnerships?

Rather than calling it quits, it is often in the best interest of the entrepreneur, the angel investor, and the acquiring company to form a partnership with another private company in order to preserve the investment.

However, this is easier said than done. Private-to-private deals are always difficult.

Investors are reluctant to give up their preferred shares in exchange for common shares. Conversely, investors in the acquiring company most often will not dilute their preferred position to bail out a failed startup. Moreover, cash is king for all startups as equity financing is hard to come by and is always expensive.

As a result, the bailout for angel investors is a bet in the form of common stock at a price that is often arbitrary and with an uncertain future.

Despite these risks, it’s a better deal to hook your wagon to a train that is moving forward, than one that has no chance. The new company will have committed investors, and at least a future to realize an exit. Any return, potential or otherwise, is always better than zero.

The problem is that most struggling startups never see this as an option. All the reasons above take this option off the table, but there is value in these companies that can be realized. The technology can be preserved and new value can be created in the hands of the right company. This preserves the work done by the entrepreneur and some of the investment originally put in by the angel.

If your angel investment is in jeopardy, don’t just look for acquisitions from the usual suspects. A startup on the verge of insolvency cannot attract a Series A investment, and is a lost investment to all. There is a way to come out on the other end, it just might not be the route you originally set out on.

Reed Taussig is president and CEO of ThreatMetrix Inc., a provider of integrated cybercrime prevention solutions. In 2012, Taussig led ThreatMetrix’s acquisition of TrustDefender, an Australian-based secure browsing technology company, enabling ThreatMetrix to offer the most complete integrated malware detection and device identification solution on the market.

With more than 30 years of experience in the computer hardware and software fields, Taussig served as president and CEO of three other successful technology companies prior to ThreatMetrix.

Big fish, little fish image via Shutterstock 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Just weeks after we reported a shift in strategy at VMware, the virtualization giant has announced its intent to acquire Virsto Software, a provider of storage performance optimization software.

VMware is refocussing its efforts to what it knows best: infrastructure. The company had intended to branch out to provide products at every layer of the entire software stack, including cloud-based applications. But with competition from scrappy startups and legacy vendors, VMware is concentrating its energies on the virtualized data center.

John Gilmartin, vice president of VMware’s storage and availability unit, said the company intends to extend the “benefits of virtualization to every domain of the datacenter — compute, network, and storage.” VMware has made a number of strategic acquisitions to bolster its technology in each of these domains, including the high-profile purchase of Nicira for $1.26 billion.

The buy-up, which the company announced in a blog post today, is expected to close at the end of the quarter. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Virsto has raised over $24 million in venture capital from investors, including August Capital, Canaan Partners, Interwest Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners and Correlation Ventures.

Hewlett-Packard‘s acquisition of Autonomy in 2011 would later earn the ignominious title as the worst corporate deal in recent memory.

Today, Autonomy is being investigated for misrepresenting its sales and accounting prior to the acquisition by Britain’s accounting watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council. The regulating body made the announcement on its website today, and reported that would also examine Autonomy’s accounting from Jan. 2009 to the middle of 2011.

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch (pictured, left) has denied the charges of accounting misconduct. “We are fully confident in the financial reporting of the company and look forward to the opportunity to demonstrate this to the F.R.C.,” he said in a statement.

HP paid $11.1 billion for Autonomy in August 2011, around the same time that it announced it would be shuttering its tablet computer and smartphone products. Even then, the price tag seemed high, given that Autonomy amassed about $870 million in annual revenues.

In November 2012, amid disappointing earnings, HP announced it would write down $8.8 billion of its acquisition of Autonomy — as the New York Times pointed out – admitting that the company was worth 79 percent less than H.P. had paid for it.

HP’s CEO Meg Whitman inherited the messy acquisition, but was on the board when the deal was approved. In the course of a year, HP executives have changed their tune from being excited about the deal to openly disappointed about lower-than-expected revenues.

A spokesperson from the Financial Reporting Council told the New York Times that the investigation may take around a year to reach disciplinary proceedings if evidence of wrongdoing is uncovered.

Top image via wrangler // Shutterstock 

Salesforce.com has acquired EntropySoft, a French startup that offers content integration solutions.

A spokesperson confirmed that the deal recently closed, but the company won’t be making a formal announcement.

EntropySoft’s sales executive Serge Guillerme updated his LinkedIn account this month to reflect his new position as a customer success strategy manager at Salesforce.

The technology is used by software vendors and large companies to simplify integration of their products with enterprise content management (ECM) tools and cloud repositories.

EntropySoft has pulled in $3.5 million in funding from French venture firm, Alven Capital, and has teams in France and in the United States.

The company has signed agreements with over 25 U.S. vendors over the years, including Symantec and EMC.

This story will be updated as we learn more.