Archive for the ‘Companies & M&A’ Category

Buongiorno buys itself into China

January 15th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

The Italian aggregator giant Buongiorno has acquired China based competitor DongAsia trough its JV Buongiorno Hong Kong (which Buongiorno italy owns for 49%). Buongionro purchased 80% of the shares for $ 2.7 million. Buongiorno hopes to start offering the Blinko B2C services to Asian consumers soon.

Mobile Advertising Firm Amobee’s second funding

January 7th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Amobee, the mobile advertising firm that also has solutions for mobile games, has just completed their second round of funding according to MocoNews. In this round they are expected to have raised between $ 15 million and $ 20 million. The exact amount in not disclosed though. Participats in this round where Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital who invested $ 5 million in the first round. They where joined by Globespan partners.

InfoSpace done with restructuring

January 5th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

We have covered InfoSpace a lot lately as a lot of things seem to have gone wrong in a short time what resulted in major restructuring. Though the rumours about the sale of their mobile gaming units are still in the air, InfoSpace says it’s done reorganising for now as it finished it’s lasts steps. From now on, Steve Elfman, who joined InfoSpace in 2003, will head up the mobile department and report directly to Jim Voelker, the CEO of InfoSpace since 2002. The complete announcement is here.

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Breakpoint merges with MNI

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Our friends at QuicklyBored report the merger between Polish developer Breakpoint and Polish media and telecoms group MNI. MNI has purchased 57% of Breakpoint valued at

AT&T buys Bellsouth and Cingular

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

AT&T announced the acquisition of Bellsouth and Cingular in the US. The new combination will have a value of up to $ 220 billion and will be the biggest in the market. AT&T announced on a mini-site the transformation of both Bellsouth and Cingular to the AT&T brand. Cingular will be re-branded early 2007 and AT&T hopes to have both networks connected before that time. This acquisition looks a lot like the acquisition of Telfort by KPN in The Netherlands earlier this year. However except for joining the networks, KPN left Telfort mostly the way it is, making it purely an acquisition to stabilize it’s market possition.

Frengo receives $ 2.3 million funding

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

MoCoNews reports social mobile gaming firm Frengo received a $ 2.3 million funding from Index Ventures Management, Khosla Ventures and others. Frengo is based in Redwood City, California. At this moment, Frengo is aimed purely at SMS games, play for fun and play to win. Nice detail is the ‘Beta’ in their company logo which is a bit strange for a service that is operating fully on a commercial business model.

Gameloft confirms position 2 in the market

December 22nd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

During this year, we witnessed a huge struggle between Gameloft and Glu for the second possition after a claim from M:Metrics that Glu was second. With Glu’s IPO Sec-1 filing for Nasdaq, Gameloft contacted us to let us know they are happy to confirm they have twice the revenue and thus twice the revenue share of Glu. The Sec-1 filing was the Christmas present Gameloft could only wish for.

Glu finally opened the books

December 20th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | 1 Comment »

We got a sweet surprise this morning as the news reached us about Glu‘s IPO filing on NASDAQ. Glu hopes to raise $ 92 million in common stock. As we all know, IPO filing means opening up the books and so all mobile news resources are going trough the numbers and interesting facts pop up everywhere. So is Glu really the claimed number 2? Probably not, but the plans with the money are clear. Pay debts, expand and acquire.

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Vodafone pulls out of Swisscom

December 19th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Swisscom is now back on it’s own again as Vodafone cashed in their 25% stake for $ 2,3 billion. Vodafone is pulling itself out of countries where they have a minority share in the operators. Swisscom will remain selling Vodafone services though. There are plenty more situations like this which we expect to report on soon.

Magyar Telekom also buys itself into content

December 15th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

After Swisskom’s purchase of Minick, the race seems on as Hungary’s largest operator Magyar Telekom buys 100% of MobilPress and 75% of Mfactory for a combined price of $ 5.4 million. When will the first mobile games developer be bought by an operator?