Google acquired English price comparison company BeatThatQuote.com today for more than $61 million.

BeatThatQuote helps its website visitors search, compare and apply for lower rates and cheaper prices on a variety of products including financial, insurance, and legal services, utilities, and shopping.

The newly acquired company’s managing director John Paleomylites announced the deal on BeatThatQuote’s homepage:

BeatThatQuote.com was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.

Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.

BeatThatQuote has been growing rapidly — it is currently bringing in more pageviews than popular social networking company Facebook and was the fastest growing website in the U.K. in 2007.

That popularity makes it likely Google will roll the company into its new deals service as it seeks to stay ahead of an increasingly crowded and diverse crop of hot startups such as Groupon and LivingSocial.

Indeed, Google’s been on quite a shopping spree for companies it thinks has potential. The search behemoth nabbed 48 different properties in 2010, and Google’s vice president of corporate development David Lawee said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that the company will be similarly aggressive this year.

It wants its new companies to continue innovating, he said.

“If you’re en entrepreneur and you come to Google, your days as an entrepreneur are not over,” said Lawee. “Bringing small entrepreneurial teams into Google who have a strong vision for what they want to do has been highly successful for us.”

Companies: beatthatquote, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Livingsocial, The Wall Street Journal

People: David Lawee

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The Street continues to parse the implications of today’s announcement by Western Digital (WDC) that it will purchase Hitachi’s disk drive unit for $4.3 billion. Western shares closed up $4.67, or 16%, at $34.68, and shares of several storage names jumped as well, despite a generally weak market.

IHS iSuppli analyst Fang Zhang notes that the deal gives Western Digital a much-needed advance in the enterprise market, where the company has had the smallest unit shipment total of any vendor to date.  Hitachi’s drive division “brings WDC the essential technology, product portfolio and experience required to compete in the enterprise segment,” says Zhang. Seagate gets 65% of its sales from the enterprise market, versus just 1% in Western’s case.

Needham & Co.’s Richard Kugele this afternoon reiterated a Strong Buy, writing that this is the fifth major integration/combination/consolidation in his time covering the industry, and that a duopoly is now forming for the drive makers.

The combination gives WDC 49% of the drive industry by units, he observes, with roughly half of each of the notebook and desktop markets, though some “share leakage” is unavoidable for WDC. Western’s management said today the deal would increase gross margin by 1 percentage point thanks to higher volume and richer mix of products, but Kugele thinks that view is “conservative.”

Kugele has a price target of $41 on WDC shares.

Kugele also cut his rating from Strong Buy to just Buy on shares of Intevac (IVAC), which makes tools used by hard drive makers. Kugele estimates the Hitachi unit provided 20% of Intevac’s revenue last year, and that may decline under Western Digital’s ownership.

Western relies upon Canon’s Anelva business for much of its equipment, Kugele notes. Also, he writes that Western management intend to be “careful with its capex,” which suggests restraint in buying new equipment. Kugele’s price target on Intevac is $14. The shares today fell 54 cents, over 4%, to $12.43.

Meantime, JMP Securities’s Alex Gauna thinks the deal is a bad thing for Marvell Technology Group (MRVL), which supplies controller chips to the disk drive industry. Western is a 21% customer of Marvell’s, while Seagate represents less than 10% of Marvell’s revenue. He cut his target price on Marvell to $25 from $22.50, and cut his revenue estimate for this fiscal year ending in January of 2012 to $3.73 billion from a prior $3.8 billion.

Judging by what happened when Seagate bought Maxtor in December of 2005, it’s quite possible Marvell will loose business as Western consummates the deal, Gauna argues, because customers will switch to buying more gear from Seagate, at least for a time. “To the extent that diversification efforts this time result in a swing back towards Seagate, this time the effect would be negative,” given Western’s prominence as a Marvell customer, he writes.

Marvell’s stock fell 32 cents, or 2%, to $15.81.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

CapLinked, a Los Angeles company that describes itself as a cross between LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for startups and investors, just announced that it has raised $525,000 in a new round of angel funding.

In the past year, both Profounder and 33needs have offered a new investment model for startups (and other organizations) with a crowdsourced approach to funding. CapLinked is a little less radical — it’s not reinventing the deals, just offering a site where investors can find them. There’s a social networking component (that’s the LinkedIn part), as well as tools that actually push the deals forward (the Salesforce part).

Startups looking for funding can create deals on CapLinked, saying how much they want to raise and sharing relevant company document. Then an investor can find the deal, send follow-up questions to the company, and share the deal with other investors.

Obviously, posting this kind of information online can raise security concerns, but CapLinked says that a company’s details are only shared with investors in their approved network, that investors must show that they are accredited before they join the site, and that companies can see exactly who looked at their deals and what information they downloaded.

CapLinked says it can be useful beyond that initial funding, because it creates a single place where a company can share all relevant documents with their investors, and where investors manage their entire private company portfolio.

The new round is relatively small, but it comes from some high-profile funders — PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (pictured above), former PayPal executive and current 500 Startups partner Dave McClure, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. They’re all connected through PayPal (Lonsdale was an intern there, and he also worked at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital), which isn’t surprising since CapLinked co-founder and chief executive Eric Jackson was PayPal’s first senior director of U.S. marketing. But the funding is still a sign that there are investors who think CapLinked serves a real need.

“Start-ups are tremendous drivers of economic growth, yet the basic mechanics of investing in new companies can be difficult and inefficient, especially for first-time entrepreneurs or people outside venture capital centers,” Thiel said in a press release. “CapLinked is providing — for the first time — an efficient online platform that connects entrepreneurs and investors, helps them build relationships, and streamlines the investment process.”

CapLinked said there are now 2,100 companies offering $800 million in potential deals on the site, as well as 1,000 investors. The company has now raised $900,000.

Tags: PayPal mafia

Companies: CapLinked

People: Dave McClure, Eric Jackson, Joe Lonsdale, Peter Thiel

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

This is the deal the ingrates known as Harbinger investors have pooh-poohed, with irrelevant arguments like the fact that they “thought they were putting money into a hedge fund that traded securities that were easy to buy and sell” and then Falcone goes and pulls something like this. Well he’ll show you. He’ll show all of you!

Philip Falcone’s LightSquared Inc. venture is close to securing a $585 million loan to build its wireless network, as it negotiates a wholesale deal with a nationwide carrier, said two people familiar with the plans. An official announcement of the loan could come as early as today, said the people, who wouldn’t be identified because the deal isn’t public. The loan, from UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co., will bring LightSquared’s cash on hand to about $1 billion, said one of the people. The company has said it currently has roughly $1.75 billion in debt and equity…LightSquared is seeking to compete with AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Clearwire Corp. in selling 4G capacity.

[Bloomberg]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Shares of AOL (AOL) are up 16 cents at $22.10 following the announcement in the wee hours that AOL is buying The Huffington Post for $315 million.
During a conference call with analysts this morning, AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong told analysts he feel the deal is a “score” for [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Q&A site Answers.com announced yesterday that it’s going to be acquired by private equity firm Summit Partners. But the decision still needs approval from the company’s shareholders, and according to a report in Business Insider, some of those shareholders aren’t very unhappy with the deal.

One source told BI, “There’s not a shot in the world this thing is going through.”

The publicly-traded company describes itself as the largest Q&A site on the Web. (It launched some of its features at the DEMO conference coproduced by VentureBeat.) Answers’ board of directors approved the deal unanimously, and at $10.50 per share/$127 million total, the deal values the publicly-traded company’s stock at 18 percent higher than its closing price on Wednesday. (After the deal was announced, the stock price rose to $10.46 at market close on Friday.)

So what’s the issue? Apparently BI talked to shareholders who think the price is way too low. During the first nine months of 2010, Answers reported $15 million in revenue, so Summit is paying less than 10 times the company’s annual revenue. Those shareholders point jealously to the 30x revenue that Demand Media earned in its initial public offering. They also say that Answers could use its $30 million in cash to improve its situation by acquiring companies or building out its salesforce.

The unhappy shareholders “claim to control as much as 40% of Answers.com stock,” but it’s not clear whether that’s actually true, or if their sentiments reflect a larger feeling of discontent among the company’s shareholders. We’ll see what happens during the actual vote.

[image via Flickr/Mark Hillary]

Tags: acquisitions

Companies: Answers.com, Summit Partners

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Corning (GLW) this evening said it would purchase Vienna, Virginia-based MobileAccess, makers of something called “distributed antenna systems,” or DAS, which Corning indicates can be useful for in-building cellular coverage.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The unit will be added to the company’s optical networking products for corporations and its [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Venture Capitalists are increasingly optimistic about the immediate future of investing in Silicon Valley. Their confidence registered 3.75 on a 5 point scale, with 5 indicating high confidence and 1 indicating low confidence, according to the quarterly Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index released today.

The index polled 35 San Francisco Bay Area venture capitalists in December 2010 about how they viewed the high-growth venture entrepreneurial environment in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next 6-18 months.

It found that confidence had ticked up slightly to 3.75 from 3.70 a quarter earlier, as VCs continue to see promise in an improving exit environment and steadily rising public capital markets.

The survey respondents all agreed that the strength in confidence is clearly related to increasing exit opportunities through both acquisition and the long awaited return of the IPO market.

It also found that the increase in acquisitions provides a context of competitive bidders to drive demand for IPO exits. And new technology developments and social trends are creating fresh market opportunities for entrepreneurs and their venture backers.

Additionally, the report found that the strength in M&A exits is being driven by growing corporate cash balances that have decided it is now worth it to chase venture-backed innovation.

Such growing corporate curiosity is a good sign for a community that has long questioned whether a possible tech bubble has been scaring away VCs spooked by still-shaky markets.

This fourth quarter reading confirms an upward trend in confidence that is now at its highest point in two years.

Still, some VCs polled recommended caution until valuations have been clearly sorted out — a trend that could be helped by the types of high-profile IPOs like LinkedIn’s public debut yesterday and Nielsen’s $1.6 billion emergence Tuesday — and investors understand the space more clearly.

“Venture capital backed start-ups and financings are seeing a new renaissance and the reason is ‘Clomosol,’” said Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. “No, it’s not a new drug but rather my coined term for the four major trends powering technology: Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Local. The wealth creation driven by Clomosol will dramatically impact both the local Bay Area economy as well as the overall technology sector.”

“However, Clomosol is not for everybody and side effects might include increased traffic, a shortage of engineers, and high valuations,” warned Ganesan. “Please talk to an experienced VC before embarking on this trend.”

Tags: cloud computing, deal, Mergers and Acquisitions, Social Media, Venture Capital

Companies: Globespan Capital Partners, Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

TripIt, the popular website for consolidating your trip details, just announced that it has been acquired by travel and expense management company Concur for a deal worth up to $120 million.

In a blog post about the deal, Tripit president and co-founder Gregg Brockway said that the startup will continue to offer Tripit products and operate out of its San Francisco offices. The only difference, he said, is that TripIt now has access to the resources of Concur, a publicly-traded company used by more than 10,000 businesses and 15 million people. Brockway writes:

I’m invigorated. I see this as a new beginning. We climbed up the hill to this point, but we’re not resting on our laurels. There are more opportunities, challenges, and adventures ahead. With Concur we’ll expand our presence among current customers, tackle the unmanaged travel space, reach out to new geographies, and go where no travel company has gone before. Watch us.

According to the deal terms, Concur agrees to pay TripIt $27 million in cash and $44 million in stock initially, with provisions to pay up to $38 million more over the next 30 months.

TripIt raised $13.1 million in funding from Azure Capital Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and others. Brockway says that the service (which starts out free but offers paid features like real-time flight alerts) currently has “millions” of users.

Tags: travel

Companies: Azure Capital Partners, Concur, OReilly AlphaTech Ventures, Tripit

People: Gregg Brockway

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Social Web browser Flock just announced that it has been acquired by social gaming giant Zynga, confirming an earlier report in TechCrunch.

Chief executive Shawn Hardin wrote that the deal is a “perfect fit” and that “Flock will help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime – on any platform.” (Zynga has built its massive audience on Facebook, but is now trying to diversify.)

The company’s browser allows users to access their social networks while browsing other websites. Hardin said Flock had 10 million users worldwide, which is a substantial audience, but not exactly a huge hit for a five-year-old company that raised about $30 million in venture funding. (Flock’s lack of success was one of the reasons to be skeptical when RockMelt, a browser with a similar concept, launched in November.)

Last week, I complained about “manquisitions”, where startups are “acquired” as a way to hire senior team members while the product is abandoned. Is this the first manquisition of 2011? TechCrunch suggests that it might be, because Zynga, Twitter, and Google were all trying to acquire the company’s engineering talent. Hardin is vague about the future of the Flock product: “We thank our users for their unwavering support and dedication. We’ll have more news about our products in the month ahead.“

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. This marks Zynga’s eighth acquisition in eight months. It last acquired mobile game company Newtoy. (Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is pictured above.)

Tags: manquisitions, social games

Companies: Flock, Zynga

People: Shawin Hardin

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals