Twitter has completed their acquisition of TweetDeck, one of the most popular clients for the microblogging service.
The purchase ended for just over $40 million in cash and stock with the closing papers signed today.
TweetDeck had been previously linked to UberMedia, who was looking to purchase the client for $30 million and had an exclusive negotiating window that ran out. Uber has the top Twitter app for BlackBerry (UberSocial) and the “highest rated” Twitter app for Android, Twidroyd and has been allegedly cooking up a plan for a “Twitter killing” service.
As arguably the best Twitter client around (and accounting for 13 percent of all tweets sent on a daily basis), TweetDeck is a hot commodity for the microblogging platform and remains the top app for “power users,” those who tweet many times per day from many different devices.
TweetDeck also allows users to connect their LinkedIn and Facebook platforms to one app.
Result for: acquisition
Microsoft is on the verge of purchasing Internet phone company Skype for over $7 billion, in what would be the company’s largest ever acquisition.
Negotiations are in the final stages but the deal could still fall apart, say multiple sources speaking to WSJ.
Skype has 663 million users globally and says 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls were made over the service in 2010.
In 2007, Microsoft overpaid for online advertising firm aQuantive, paying $6 billion in what is their current largest deal, ever. In 2008, Microsoft offered $48 billion for Yahoo but was turned down and eventually the deal collapsed. Yahoo is valued at $25 billion today so it certainly appears that Microsoft dodged a bullet.
The Skype deal will be very expensive given the company’s history of no profits.
In 2010, Skype had nice revenue of $860 million but lost $7 million. Google and Facebook were reported as being interested in the VoIP company, as well.
Result for: acquisition
AOL is prepared to cut up to 20 percent of its global workforce, this week, with as many as 900 people losing there jobs.
The company will cut 400 jobs in India and 200 in the U.S., while outsourcing another 300 to other companies.
At its peak during the tech bubble, AOL had 20,000 employees. After this week, the company will have just over 4000.
Says CEO Tim Armstrong (via Reuters):
We want to go from taking arrows to catching arrows. Today is a difficult one for our company.
AOL will turn around.
AOL just completed its massive $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post news site.
