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Glu Mobile agrees to acquire China’s leading mobile games publisher

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viewmedia.jpgGlu Mobile has agreed to acquire Beijing Zhangzhong MIG Information Technology Co. Ltd., a leading developer and publisher of mobile games for China. The acquisition accelerates the company’s presence in China and deepens Glu’s relationship with China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in China.

According to China’s Ministry of Information Industry, the Chinese mobile market has more than 500 million mobile subscriptions. With the acquisition of MIG, Glu will be positioned to more effectively publish its existing world-class branded and award-winning original titles in China and to continue to publish MIG’s market leading portfolio of culturally relevant and popular local titles. Importantly, this acquisition makes Glu the first top-tier global mobile games publisher to acquire a developer and publisher of mobile games in China.

As part of the acquisition, Wang Bin, chief executive officer, MIG, will join Glu as General Manager focused on China and Glu will add MIG’s approximately 80 employees to its worldwide team. These employees will continue to develop and publish mobile games that are relevant to a local, and potentially global, audience as well as work in conjunction with Glu’s existing Beijing office to further penetrate the Chinese market.

Under the terms of the transaction, which the parties anticipate will close in approximately three weeks, MIG’s shareholders will receive approximately $14.7 million in cash. Additional payments of up to $25 million in cash and stock are contingent upon the achievement by MIG of certain financial milestones during 2008, with a portion of the additional payments subject to continued employment of the principal officers of MIG.

Originally posted on December 3, 2007 @ 11:49 am

Fox Entertainment Group acquires Beliefnet

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beliefnet.pngFox Entertainment Group (FEG) announced its acquisition of Beliefnet, a website that enables consumers to better understand their faith and build diverse spiritual communities by providing content and tools for a broad range of religions and spiritual approaches. Beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirituality destination, will become part of Fox Digital Media, spearheaded by President Dan Fawcett, which takes on an expanded role to support FEG’s vast cable, TV and film brands online, and drive FEG’s continued growth in the online market.

The acquisition provides Beliefnet with vast resources to further build and enhance its already popular brand. It also offers an online platform for FEG to distribute content from its extensive media library and for News Corp. to expand its faith-based businesses, including HarperCollins’ Zondervan and HarperOne brands, and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment’s faith-based programming initiative.

Beliefnet provides devotional tools, access to the best spiritual teachers in the world, thought-provoking commentary and a portfolio of web-based social networking tools to enable a supportive community surrounding each person’s unique spiritual principles and beliefs.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Originally posted on December 4, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

Kaboose acquires the largest online parenting club in the UK

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new media newsKaboose, the largest independent family-focused online media company in the U.S., has acquired Bounty.com, a leading family destination and parenting club online in the UK, for $140 million.

The acquisition of Bounty.com is expected to complement Kaboose’s other sites like BabyZone, ParentZone, AmazingMoms and TwoPeasInABucket.

Hopefully, this will give the Toronto-based company a better fighting chance against established players in the family-friendly demographic like Nickelodeon, Walt Disney, and J&J’s BabyCenter.

However, both parties declined to deal with the media until the equity-refinancing deal for $115 million is completed.

Why $140 million? Bounty.com is not only the largest parenting club in the UK with 2.4 million members but also the largest database of young families in Europe. Not to mention its strong partnerships with leading multinational companies like P&G, Unilever, J&J, and Kimberly-Clark.

Originally posted on November 16, 2007 @ 12:39 pm

AOL acquires Q&A service Yedda

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yedda.pngAOL has acquired Yedda, Inc., a social search Questions and Answer service. Yedda will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Founded in 2006, Yedda employs patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question. Yedda’s semantic matching technology intelligently routes questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can “syndicate” their expertise and spark a community-wide dialogue of people invited to discuss and learn from each other’s experiences.

Using Yedda’s technology, AOL will incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate “Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming months.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Originally posted on November 12, 2007 @ 11:22 am

Discovery Communications to acquire HowStuffWorks.com

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901am.comDiscovery Communications, a leading nonfiction media company, has announced that it has agreed to acquire HowStuffWorks, the leading online source of high quality, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works.

Acquiring HowStuffWorks further strengthens Discovery Communications’ global position as the number-one nonfiction media company dedicated to providing knowledge and satisfying curiosity across all platforms.

In addition to an editorial team that creates new content every day, HowStuffWorks leverages the exclusive digital rights to over 30,000 books, 800,000 images and more than 180,000 maps as it explains the world from brains to bats, from rocket engines to roller coasters, from hybrid cars to HDTV, and countless other topics.

“Contextually integrating engaging clips drawn from Discovery’s vast video library of more than 100,000 hours of programming with the family-friendly and evergreen collection of expertly written articles on HowStuffWorks will ultimately deliver an accurate ‘video wikipedia.’ Information-seeking consumers will find a rich, multimedia experience to answer the world’s questions, and our business partners will find new opportunities to reach targeted audiences of engaged consumers,” said Jeff Arnold, who will continue his role as CEO of HowStuffWorks.

Originally posted on October 15, 2007 @ 10:49 am