Verizon to sell Tumblr to WordPress parent firm

Verizon has agreed to sell its blogging platform Tumblr to the parent company of online publishing tool WordPress. Tumblr will act as a complementary site to WordPress after the acquisition.

Automattic Inc, the parent company of WordPress, will buy Tumblr and take on its 200 staff members for an undisclosed amount. Verizon, the current owner of Tumblr, had been searching a buyer for the social media platform since earlier this year.

Tumblr was once a hugely influential force in the blogging and social media sphere, but it becomes less so under Yahoo and then Verizon’s ownership. Meanwhile, platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube moved to fill the void and become much larger cultural forces as a result. Still, Tumblr does have a very active and dedicated community.

Verizon is in the process of revamping its media group, which struggled to meet revenue targets in recent years. The business, home to legacy Yahoo and AOL web properties such as HuffPost, TechCrunch, feminist media brand Makers and celebrity-interview site Build, is increasingly focused on subscription and original content.

Apple Buys Shazam

Apple Inc. agreed to acquire music-identification service Shazam, taking ownership of one of the first apps to demonstrate the power of the iPhone, recognizing songs after hearing just a few bars of a tune.

Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to users. The Shazam app uses the microphone on a smartphone or computer to identify almost any song playing nearby and then point’s users to places they can listen to it in future, such as Apple Music or Google’s YouTube.

While Shazam has been popular with customers, it struggled turning its clever music service into a business that justified its valuation. It expanded beyond simple audio recognition in 2010 by adding capabilities that let television viewers “Shazam” an ad, which would then open a promotion from the advertiser on a user’s device. The company said this feature was used 700,000 times during the 2014 Super Bowl broadcast.

In November, Shazam had about 175 million monthly active users globally across iOS and Android, according to research firm App Annie. The U.S. is the largest single market, with about 20 million active users in November, while the U.K. had about 4 million in the same month. The acquisition would help Apple embed that capability more deeply into its music offerings. The company’s digital assistant Siri gained Shazam integration in 2014, so users could ask it what song is playing in the background.

Twitch acquired ClipMine

In an announcement about a set of new discovery tools, Amazon-owned video game streaming site Twitch also unveiled that it recently acquired Palo Alto-based video indexing platform ClipMine. The startup’s technology is now being put to use to translate visual information in videos – like objects, text, logos and scenes – into metadata that can help people more easily find the streams they want to watch.

Launched back in 2015, ClipMine had originally introduced a platform designed for crowdsourced tagging and annotations. The idea then was to offer a technology that could sit over top videos on the web – like those on YouTube, Vimeo or DailyMotion – that allowed users to add their own annotations. This, in turn, would help other viewers find the part of the video they wanted to watch, while also helping video publishers learn more about which sections were getting clicked on the most.

The company later pivoted to focus on the e-sports industry, with tools that could extract information from game videos like player names, game type, number of gaming sessions per stream, and more. It also shifted away from the idea of crowdsourcing to take advantage of other technologies, like computer vision and machine learning.

Twitch’s interest in the company’s deep learning-based video indexing platform was due to its ability to analyze video content – like gamer’s streams – to identify what’s taking place in those streams, who’s playing and other variables. It has now put this technology to use with the launch of new stream discovery tools for Blizzard Entertainment’s “Overwatch” and “Hearthstone.” In the directories for those game streams, viewers are able to filter channels by a number of factors, including by hero on “Overwatch” streams, by game mode, player rank, number of wins, and by hero class on “Hearthstone” streams.

Microsoft acquires Beam

Microsoft has acquired Beam; a Seattle based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to form services like Twitch and YouTube adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls.

Players interacting through Beam can direct the play of the person streaming, doing things like setting which weapon load out they take into battle for multiplayer shooters. Visual controls provide viewers the ability to help players pick quests, and you can even assign challenges that alter the gameplay considerably from what you’d get via a typical play through.

Microsoft Beam acquisition is an attempt to strengthen company Xbox gaming service. Microsoft says it is bringing Beam interactive technology into the Xbox family to make Xbox Live more Social and fun. Beam interactive streaming platform can be enabled with any game. With Minecraft for instance, Beam users can not only see their favorite streamer but can also play along with them.

Microsoft has been steadily acquiring startups and big name tech organization in order to strengthen some of its core services. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for a record $26 Billon in order to better connect with professionals and expand its productivity services. With Beam, Microsoft would try to strengthen its core Xbox Live service while Beam will gain resources to build its product into a bigger game streaming platform.

Comcast to buy DreamWorks Animation

Comcast Corp, the parent of Universal Pictures, agreed to buy DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. in a deal valued at $3.8 Billion, building on the studio’s film and TV franchises by characters like Shrek as well as a US based production house.

Comcast will pay $41 a share in cash for the animation studio. Buying the maker of the Shrek and Kung Fu Panda films will bolster Comcast children lineup in theaters and add online assets like Awesomeness TV, which targets millennial on YouTube. Comcast would make an ideal parent for DreamWorks Animation, especially with its ownership of Illumination, maker of hit films Minions and Despicable Me.

Glendale, California based DreamWorks underwent a deep restructuring last year that reduced its workforce by 18% and cut the number of films it made after a series of flops. Under DreamWorks Animation, Illumination’s animators are largely based in Paris. With the acquisition, Universal gains a fully-fledged US based movie and TV producer and distributor.

Comcast would pay DreamWorks a fee of $200 Million if the deal is blocked by regulators. DreamWorks Animation would also provide a source of content for Universal growing theme park business. Universal already features Shrek rides at its parks in Florida, California, Japan and Singapore. The company is building a theme park in China, where Kung Fu Panda has been a big hit. 

Vidooly acquires iCouchApp

Noida based video analytics startup, Vidooly has acquired over the top (OTT) content company iCouchApp, also from Noida, for an undisclosed amount. As part the deal, all the assets and intellectual property of iCouchApp, including its technology that powers mobile apps of TV giants like Zee TV and History TV18, will come into Vidooly fold.

The iCouchApp technology allows consumers to discover new videos, interact with TV shows and keep track of their favorite shows, at the same allowing media companies to create and maintain their own OTT app. iCouchApp was serving 1.5 Million monthly active users on its platform. The iCouchApp expertise in the OTT segment will allow Vidooly to provide actionable data across VOD (video on Demand) platforms and embrace the trend of mainstream TV going online.

Founded in November 2014, Vidooly had in June 2015 raised $1 Million from Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners. Vidooly has so far added over 5,000 individual YouTube channels and 15 multi-channel networks across the globe to its list of customers using its dashboard. Nearly 120,000 videos are uploaded every month through Vidooly network while its big data engine analysis over 500 million monthly video through its platform.

Google Important Acquisitions

Google has spent more than $28 Billion on a whooping 163 companies since 2001. That is almost one company one month. The search Engine could have purchased all kinds of companies, service, and technologies from mapping companies to security services to gadgets and robots to gaming and facial recognition software and much more. With so many acquisitions, let us look at acquisitions, which have influenced Google business.

Google first invested in Green Energy startup before it completed its purchase of Makani Power in May 2014. This acquisition cost Google $30 Million. Makani has operated out of Google X Labs to build airborne wild turbines, which have the potential to be the dominant form of clean energy. Google purchased Zagat in September 2011 in $151 Million. It was mostly about getting the company’s content into Google services including search, Maps, and Earth. Google purchased Mexico based Titan Aerospace Company that made solar-powered flying drones in April for $60 Million. It can contribute to the Google Maps and Earth or even work with Makani Power Project. It is also playing a big role in Google project Loon, which strives to bring Internet connectivity to those regions without it beaming broadband from the sky.

In March 2013, Google purchased Toronto based DNNreserach Inc. to continue researching its experimental neural network. Google neural network proved it could identify the hundreds of millions of street and house numbers to help its Google street view users with location and navigation. It was purchased in $5 Million. Google wants to organize the world’s data and multimedia. For this, Google acquired DeepMind Technologies in January for $650 Million. It gives computers corresponding perception capabilities so machines can do things like listen music and soundtracks and build their perceptions. Google purchased Boston Dynamics in $500 Million. It used to make mobile research robots for the pentagon but now they are making robots for Google. Boston dynamics also made drones for Amazon. Google purchased GPS and navigation making company Waze for $996 Million last June. Google has vastly improved its real time mapping data about road conditions, closures, and accidents.

Google buys Nest labs in January last year for $3.2 Billion with a plan to bring Android to living room. Name of the project was “Android@home.” Nests made two home products, a thermostat, and a smoke detector. Google purchased Double Click in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion. Double Click has been a source of income for Google, developing and serving its ad services to customers like Apple, Coca-cola, and Nike. Google purchased world’s largest video sharing site YouTube in $1.65 Billion. It is the number three website in US and globally on which users upload 100 hours of new video content every minute. Google best deal ever was to buy Andy Rubins Android in $50 Billion. It was purchased in 2006 and is the most used smartphone operating system in the world.

These days Android, it is empowering in car systems, games, televisions, tablets, and wearable devices. These were the most important acquisition of Google. Recently, they purchased Jetpac, Emu, and Directr Inc. Most of the Google purchases are startups, which can add value to Google business and empower world with something new.