WebProWorld
Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web.
Perhaps you’re thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.
Facebook just announced that it is acquiring FriendFeed. All FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will keep their senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
Disney has announced it has acquired a stake in Hulu that is thought to be as high as 30% according to the folks over at Mashable. Disney has now joined NBC Universal and News Corp. in this venture.
The momentum this gives the video site is very real as it looks to jump on a position in the market that perhaps YouTube may be too late to the game on. YouTube has just started to strike deals with the major media producers and their lineup of available programs to watch is not as impressive as Hulu’s.
Yes, that’s correct. Yahoo! has acquired IndexTools and now has become a major player in the analytics space. Google Analytics and even Omniture now appear to have another direct competitor in Yahoo/IndexTools – it should be interesting to see how Yahoo will market IndexTools in the near future. Eric Peterson, has a great follow up to this story on his blog, speaking about how this acquisition will change the analytics game:
The Flashforward Conference and Film Festival is a historic event as the longest-running and largest gathering of Flash designers and developers in the world. It was developed nine years ago and has been managed by lynda.com events and Lynda Weinman since 2005.
YAHOO! MUSIC SHIFTS GEARS
Well, it was bound to happen: Google has finally made another acquisition, and this time, the lucky target was a company known as Jaiku.
Microsoft has acquired comparison shopping engine Jellyfish, and it actually looks like a cool company!
Never mind the kit: Kaboodle alone costs over $30 million. That’s the social shopping community’s rumored price tag, anyway, following an acquisition by Hearst Corp.; Kenneth A. Bronfin, the president of Hearst Interactive Media, explained that his company thinks Kaboodle “will bring to social shopping what MySpace has brought to social media.”
iCrossing received $62 million in funding last week, and Jeffrey Herzog, the digital marketing company’s founder and CEO, said that a portion of it would go towards “strategic acquisition capital.” Herzog wasn’t kidding – iCrossing has now bought Proxicom.
