Recent acquisitions

Google

• Android - Stealth startup doing mobile phone software
• Urchin - Web analytics
• Picasa - Photo management
• Keyhole - Satellite imaging
• Dodgeball - Geolocation and social networking, the people here were also a big factor - Dan
• Vint Cerf - One of the fathers of the internet
• Andy Hertzfeld - Member of the original Macintosh team
• Ian Hickson - Mozilla > Netscape > Opera > Google
• Measure Map - Statistics for blogs
• Writely - Web word processor
• SketchUp - 3D software

Yahoo

• del.icio.us - Social bookmarking
• Oddpost - AJAX webmail
• Flickr - Photo sharing
• blo.gs - Blog tracker
• Whereonearth - Geodata
• Dialpad - VoIP
• Internet Archive (collaboration)
• upcoming.org
  • Qi Lu said at Startup School that the people were the primary reason for purchasing upcoming.org.
• Danah Boyd - Social software researcher
• Cameron Marlow - Media Lab weblog researcher
• Simon Willison - A-list web development blogger
• WebJay - online playlist community

AOL

• Weblogs, Inc. - Professional bloggers

News Corp

• MySpace - Social networking

Verisign

• Weblogs.com - Blog tracker
• Moreover - "real-time aggregated current awareness and online news solutions"

The Moreover acquision is interesting. According to the website, they received $21M in first-round venture funding in 2000. They were sold to Verisign for $30M. Certainly not a slam-dunk. Was the $21M a bubble-influenced number that they could never hope to multiply, or was there some other reason a sale at $30M made sense?

eBay

• Skype - end-user VOIP

NewsGator

• Ranchero - NetNewsWire newsreader, MarsEdit
• Bradbury Software - FeedDaemon newsreader