Oyo buys Las Vegas Hooters hotel

In what is its first property purchase in the U.S. Softbank backed Oyo hotels and homes, has bought the Hooters Casino Hotel Las Vegas. Hooters Casino Hotel will now be rebranded and designed as Oyo Hotel & Casino Las Vegas. It provides 657 rooms across 19 floors and a 35,000 square-foot casino.

Earlier in June, Oyo had announced its plan to invest $300 million in the U.S. Currently, there it has over 112 Oyo Hotels in more than 60 cities and 21 states in the U.S. Oyo has been on an acquisition spree. In July, it confirmed its acquisition of Innov8, a co-working spaces provider, highlighting the company’s increasing focus on the fast-growing segment.

Founded in 2013, OYO Hotels & Homes is the world’s third-largest chain of hotels, homes, managed living and workspaces. The portfolio combines fully operated real estate comprising of more than 23,000 hotels and 125,000 vacation homes. Over the years, it has attracted an array of investors including the likes of Airbnb, SoftBank Vision Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital India, and Hero Enterprise.

In May, Oyo said it has agreed to acquire Amsterdam-based Leisure Group, from Axel Springer, a media and technology company, for an undisclosed amount. Leisure is a vacation rental company in Europe, which manages holiday homes, holiday parks, and holiday apartments. The transaction was pegged around $416 million, according to several media reports. Last year, it acquired Mumbai-based Weddingz.in, an online marketplace for wedding venues, and AblePlus Solutions Pvt. Ltd, an Internet of Things (IoT) technology company.

Twitter acquires Lightwell

Twitter’s ongoing, long-term efforts to make conversations easier to follow and engage with on its platform is getting a boost with the company’s latest acquihire. The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps.

Lightwell says that its toolset, which previously required a subscription, will be made available for free this week as part of the acquisition. Users won’t need to login or create an account, and they’ll be able to layout, prototype, and export to iOS without a plan. Published apps built with Lightwell won’t be affected, but the team notes that it’ll no longer actively support or add new features to Lightwell.

In recent months, Twitter has redoubled its efforts to make conversations among users easier to follow on its platform — and less toxic. Within its invite-only prototype mobile app, Twitter, it’s implemented new visuals intended to make replies more distinguishable from strung-together tweets, along with timelines connecting replies to other users within larger threads.

The company Hullabalu developed Lightwell software to create an original story series for children called The Adventures of Pan, which became a top seller in over 38 countries and racked up millions of downloads. Lightwell enables designers to create and ship animations across devices without developers having to recreate them by hand in Apple’s Xcode development environment, with support for properties like ambient motion, rotation, layout constraints, and scroll views as well as screen transitions and audio mapping.

Nazara acquires Sportskeeda

Mobile gaming platform Nazara Technologies has acquired a majority stake in sports content website Sportskeeda.com, continuing its string of acquisitions and investments in the sports and internet space.

Investments and acquisitions have been a key part of Nazara’s growth strategy, with bets in the past year or so including fantasy gaming platform HalaPlay, and real money quiz app Qunami. Sportskeeda offers news and views on sports such as cricket, football, basketball and pro-wrestling, with freelance writers, bloggers and sports enthusiasts largely generating its content.

The acquisition will also help Nazara expand its user base to countries such as the US. Nazara, which was planning to go public in 2018, and had obtained approval from the markets regulator, shelved its plans owing to weak market conditions. It plans to attempt a listing again next year.

Gaming companies have seen heavy user and investor interest in the last few years, driven by wider internet penetration spearheaded by Reliance Jio, and higher willingness of consumers to pay for mobile games.