Oracle has announced that it will acquire Grapeshot, a startup out of Cambridge, England, that has developed a platform to help ensure “brand safety”, along with solutions to help brands, agencies, publishers and ad platforms to match ads to more specific placements overall. The startup will become a part of the Oracle Data Cloud, Oracle… Read More »

Bose has acquired Detour, an audio tour startup founded by Groupon founder Andrew Mason. The acquisition, which involves only the software and tour content — not the team — was quietly announced on Detour’s blog a few days ago, followed by an email to customers. Bose, initially, seems like an unlikely acquirer for an app… Read More »

Square has acquired elements of corporate catering startup Zesty. Square, which already owns on-demand food delivery service Caviar, plans to use Zesty’s assets to strengthen Caviar’s corporate ordering business, Caviar for Teams. Neither company disclosed financial terms of the deal, but the plan is for Caviar and Zesty to operate independently in the short term…. Read More »

Adobe has today announced the acquisition of Sayspring, a New York-based startup that aims to make it easier for everyone to build voice-based apps that integrate with virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. Founded in 2017, New-York based Sayspring has technology that makes it easy to design voice applications without coding. The full… Read More »

Sports media startup Fantastec has acquired London-based We Are Colony. Fantastec was founded just last year by Steve Madincea, a sports marketing veteran who created sponsorship agency Prism and continued to run it after selling to ad giant WPP. Fantastec’s goal is to engage sports fans through technology like video on demand, virtual reality, augmented reality… Read More »

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Alibaba plans to purchase the roughly-60 percent of Ele.me that it currently doesn’t own from the other investors, which include search giant Baidu. Alibaba Group is seeking to acquire full control of Ele.me by buying out Baidu and other investors in the Chinese food delivery startup. Beijing Hualian Department Store Co,… Read More »

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has agreed to buy video doorbell maker Ring, the companies said on Tuesday, in what analysts see as a growing bet on delivering packages inside of shoppers’ homes and on home security. The deal valued Ring at more than $1 billion. Amazon declined to discuss the terms. Ring is set to be… Read More »

Momo, the Chinese location-based social networking app that has more recently made a big push into dating services and is traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of around $6 billion, announced that it has acquired Tantan, China’s top dating app, for “approximately 5.3 million newly issued Class A ordinary shares of the Company and US$600.9 million in… Read More »

To coincide with MWC in Barcelona and a bigger step into the WiFi business, Nokia has announced that it has acquired Unium, a startup out of Seattle that builds technology for mesh WiFi for home networking services. Unium’s tech is used to address one of the biggest pain-points in home WiFi today: it helps fill… Read More »

VMware will acquire CloudCoreo to help customers get a better understanding of their risks in the cloud. The small Seattle team — less than ten employees — will join VMware’s Cloud Services unit and CloudCoreo’s flagship configuration-management product will get folded into that group, said Milin Desai, general manager for VMware Cloud Services. Terms of… Read More »