The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
Companies, and indeed people, remake themselves all the time. And it seems that it is no different for Spotify, who has just announced that they are acquiring podcast producing and hosting platforms Gimlet and Anchor. And that they plan to acquire a whole lot more in the podcasting space, to become a full-service audio provider.
The world woke up to this astounding business news this morning: online retailer Amazon is buying natural food wholesaler Whole Foods in a deal reported to be north of $13 billion.
Verizon and Yahoo have been sleeping with each other in one way or another since at least 2005 (when the domain verizon.yahoo.com was launched), but now Verizon is finally going to make an honest woman of Yahoo. Yesterday it was announced that Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion. Now we just need to agree on what the Hollywood-style name for the new couple should be – should it be Veriz-hoo or Yahoozon?
Microsoft and LinkedIn have announced that Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for a cool 26.2 billion dollars.
It’s true. It’s sad. Google is acquiring song curation service and playlist creator extraordinaire Songza. Why do we say that it’s sad? Because to us Songza was already a nearly perfect service, so while it can do good things for Google, it’s hard to imagine that Google will improve Songza.
Google has just announced that it will acquire Nest Labs, the company that has put smart thermostats in homes. Meaning that Google will now be monitoring your home for you.
Call us conspiracy theorists, but the first thing that we thought of when we heard that Microsoft and Nokia had inked a deal for Microsoft to buy Nokia – and with it Stephen Elop, who left Microsoft three years ago to become the CEO of Nokia – was that this was an inside job. Are we the only ones who are suspicious?
Google has gobbled up restaurant review outfit Zagat, in their latest Pacman-like gobbling juggernaut. Since June 1st of this year, Google has acquired no fewer than PostRank, Admeld, SageTV, Punchd, Fridge, PittPatt, Dealmap, Motorola Mobility (if approved), Zave Networks, and, now, Zagat. In fact, Zagat will be Google’s 20th acquisition this year, and they still have three and a half months to go. And Zagat is the 102nd company acquired by Google in the past 8 years, with half of those acquisitions occuring in just the past two years!
If the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has its way, the proposed merger between AT and T and T-Mobile will be vetoed, because it will create a monopoly in violation of antitrust law. According to papers filed by the DOJ in Federal court, “AT and T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low-priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market.”
Why yes, we did, not two weeks ago, tell you of a possible T-Mobile merger with Sprint Nextel. However, it seems that AT&T had other ideas, and has made a flat-out aquisition bid for T-Mobile USA, to the tune of $39 billion. You just know that the resulting love child – IF the deal is allowed to go through, as it creates one hell of a monopoly – will have to be called, even if not officially, AT&T&T-Mobile, or, just, AT&T&T.