Acquisitions: September 2007 Archives

Never heard of Zingku?  Well, don't worry.  From the news I'm seeing it looks like it was not on anybody's radar.  But nevertheless, Google just bought Zingku for an undisclosed amount.  The service is interesting, but nothing that I would call unique.  There are all kinds of speculations about why Google did so, and GigaOm thinks it's going to be an addition to Orkut, but if you ask me, it's about who knows who and having good VC/investment banker connections...

On a separate note (I do not have much interest in telecom anymore), in case you have not heard 3Com was sold for $2.2B to Bain Capital and Huawei Technologies, a Chinese telco.  Not bad.

For various reasons I have been looking at this part of the industry for a while now, and this one got me by surprise.  Per TechCrunch (no official statements yet) Mozy - the online backup service - is snatched by EMC for $76M.  Now to have the perspective, you need to know that: 1) Mozy had raised less than $2M in VC money (sweet deal, huh?), and 2) As a user of their service (this is just one opinion but you can say that it's an "informed" opinion) their service was far from reliable.  So EMC has not bought a good "product", it has bought a good "concept" and arguably a good team.

Well, nevertheless, congratulations to whoever that made this happen, probably their CEO.  The product might have not performed, but the company certainly did :-)

Interesting numbers about the company revenue and the valuation.  Also covers Citrix/XenSource acquisition:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780434-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Been an eventful today... Aside from the Facebook news, a number of other things were announced:

Google AdSense for Mobile

$3M in seed funding for Penelope - open source Thunderbird related company

And finally...

Yahoo! buys Zimbra for $350M.

Oh, and did I mention - this is a few days old though - that Yahoo! launched its own social networking site?