AdKnowledge has announced the acquisition of Lookery today. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Only the Lookery ad network has been acquired by AdKnowledge, the data network portion will remain with Lookery.

From the AdKnowledge publisher blog, "Lookery has been seeking a company to acquire its ad serving business that is able to both provide you with the same or higher payouts that you are currently receiving and provide the same level of service that you have come to expect from Lookery." AdKnowledge acquired Facebook developer ad network Cubics last year.

The Lookery Guaranteed CPM program will continue within the Cubics network for those publishers who are enrolled. AdKnowledge self-reports over 10 billion social advertising impressions per month.

Found via the Facebook developer forum. There’s also more information about the acquisition on the Cubics/AdKnowledge Publisher blog.

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Reflexive has announced that they have been acquired by Amazon. Reflexive is a maker and distributor of casual games and apparently Amazon will help Reflexive reach a new set of customers for their games. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker noted on the acquisition:

As I’m sure you can all imagine this is a very exciting day for us at Reflexive. It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play.

At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward.

What this means for all you developers is that it’s time to get excited about your future with Reflexive. We can’t talk about everything yet, but we’ll be in touch shortly with more information. All of the features that you know and love about GameCenterSolution will still be available to you now and in the future, and you can continue to submit games through the Reflexive site. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

I’ve created enough casual games in my career to know that they were hot, are hot and will continue to be hot. They bring together players, developers, aggregators and advertisers into a unique opportunity where everyone benefits. SellMoreGames and Gamezebo have more details on the acquisition.

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Akamai has announced plans to acquire NY-based acerno today. The transaction is considered a merger and while financial terms were not disclosed, Akamai notes that the deal "is not expected to have a material impact on Akamai’s normalized earnings in 2008."

Acerno aggregates anonymous consumer shopping data to help create the best possible advertising messages for retailers and manufacturers.

Akamai is also announcing the launch of the "Advertising Decision Solutions" service. Acerno’s technology is at the core of this new service which will help integrate real-time data from consumers. The ADS service is targeted towards buyers and sellers of online advertising create audience segments.

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Automattic, maker of the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets. The deal apparently follows an integration project between the two companies, featuring a PollDaddy plugin for WordPress.org blogs as well as an integration within the editor on WordPress.com. Both products are immediately available following today’s news.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, offered the following comment on his blog: “As we started to look at building out our own service for [polls and surveys], it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.”

As for PollDaddy, the two-man team will join Automattic and continue working on the product, with plans to continue to serve polling applications to platforms beyond WordPress. From their announcement: “We are still 100% focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow.”

The Automattic-PollDaddy deal follows news last month that Automattic was buying IntenseDebate, makers of a popular third-party commenting plugin. Last year, Automattic also bought Gravatar, a service for maintaining the same avatar in your comments across blogs.

As I mentioned back when Automattic acquired IntenseDebate, it makes a lot of sense for the company to scoop up startups that feed into their ecosystem. Like IntenseDebate, PollDaddy instantly has added millions of members, who can in turn begin using the software not only on WordPress blogs, but on all of the other services that PollDaddy supports. Meanwhile, more broadly, it would appear that the startups with money (Automattic raised nearly $30 million recently) are going to aggressively scoop up those with limited prospects for survival during the current economic and venture capital crunch.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Rumor: Automattic Valued at $150-300 MillionAutomattic Acquires IntenseDebate to Shake Up the CommentspherePollDaddy Has a Baby. His Name is Jr. There’s an API Too.Automattic Assimilates BuddyPress, Moves Towards Social NetworkingAutomattic Acquires Portable Avatar Tool GravatarWordpress Ups Free Storage Space to 3GBAnother $29.5 Million for Wordpress Founder

NY-based Hakia has announced a relaunch of their search engine service today. Hakia is a semantic search engine which uses partial human filtered results to help get past the typical search results. Today the company is adding an even stronger human element: the "credible Web sites" index.

What this means is when you complete a search on Hakia, you can select to see only sites that Hakia deems "credible". The credible sites list will be vetted by librarians and informational professionals.

Hakia has also launched "hakia Galleries" which bring together all types of search results (image, text, credible, etc.) on a topic basis. It’s an interesting way to provide the data rather than for an absolute specific query.

I like the Hakia team and love that they are in NYC. But they have to start marketing the search engine. Get up to Times Square and setup a corner where you can show tourists why Hakia is better than Google. Let those tourists go back to their countries and spread the word. Sure I am simplifying things, but they have to raise the level of awareness to drive search volume. They don’t have a CEO who can push links to tens of thousands of Twitter users for quick traffic boosting. Booths at tradeshows won’t cut it alone.

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Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today’s acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO Gary Marino will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

Conference Call Notes:

John Donahoe says they want to focus this year on the following 3 things:

1. make ebay easier to use
2. improve product selection
3. improve paypal’s leadership both on and off ebay

We are reducing our workforce by 10% or by about 1,000 total workers. It will impact most parts of the company. We are creating efficiency while investing where needed.

John discusses the acquisitions of DBA from Denmark. He notes they own 25% of Craigslist. If you add up all of the sites that are in the eBay network, they have more traffic than Craigslist.

PayPal has a strong and growing penetration on eBay. Growth on eBay has led to growth off of eBay - one million merchants off eBay use PayPal. They focus on large merchants - 35 of the top 100 online merchants offer PayPal. 63 million consumers use Paypal. This quarter Paypal volume off ebay will be larger than on ebay.

BML (bill me later) and paypal belong together. we know the company and their unique capabilities - now is the right time to combine both companies. Bill me later is the number 2 online payments company. Bill Me Later brings 3 strengths to paypal:

1. a complementary merchant base to paypal
2. bml delivers a compelling consumer value proposal
3. bml helps paypal leverage its distinct business advantage - lower costs

We now have the #1 and #2 online payment brands. They believe that even with the market conditions, they believe this is the right time to bring the companies together.

Gary Marino, Bill Me Later CEO now speaking:

The more we spoke with paypal, the more we saw similar goals. He explains how bml works. They have a lot of risk models and can figure out if the sale should proceed in under 3 seconds. The appeal of BML is how easy to use - consumers like it apparently when they are in a rush.

BML typically sees double shopping cart size when using the BML checkout option.

They have re-engineered the credit model - they do not issue credit lines- they authorize sales one at a time.

Scott Thompson - Paypal President now speaking:

Bill Me Later is a lot like Paypal and that’s why it makes sense to come together. Discusses how BML has mostly larger merchants while PP has mostly ebay shoppers. Shoppers have more choice online now.

BML will help lower the overall transaction costs for Paypal. Paypal is available on 25% of all transactions on the internet.

Clearly their goal is to grab as much of the larger volume and transaction sites based on this call.

The acquisitions total 1.3 billion.

Stronger dollar has been a challenge for the company - more details on their earnings call next week.

Q&A:

• Bill Me Later will become part of PayPal. Gary is incented to stay. BML team is excited about the deal
• Expects BML to be on eBay by early 2009
• Paypal has 150 million accounts, 64 million are active
• valuation for bml less than half what it would have been a year ago
• biggest line item of cost for Paypal is transaction expense
• in 2009, bml and pp will interlink accounts with goal to have one signup process
• Skypte is 6% of total business

call has concluded.

Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today’s acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

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The NYSIA monthly meeting for September consisted of a boot camp for startups. I was able to capture each of the segments on video and this session discussed sales and marketing planning for a new business. Sherri Sklar from Sherri Sklar Strategies presented why you should stay away from marketing blunders, top business mistakes startups make and briefly discussed the elements needed in a sales/marketing plan.

Interesting note: Sklar doesn’t appear to own sherrisklarstrategies and has an overall poor Google result page for terms associated with her name. This is something I would include in any marketing presentation that’s aimed at startups.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Nick O’Neill is reporting that MySpace has launched a new advertising option within the social network. The advertising option is tied into MySpace Music and is focused on musicians.

Nick notes, "The service also provides targeting by gender, age, location, and specific interest categories. The current categories are Auto, Books, Fashion, Health & Fitness, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Sports, Television, and Video Games. Rather than typing specific keywords, advertisers are forced to select from a pre-defined set of “Genres” within each category."

It looks like MySpace offers a basic ad creation tool to make it easy for non-designers to create an ad. There’s also a live filter which displays the potential impression counts based on the above targeting selections.

After the high rates MySpace charges for their developer gallery, my guess is that the only musicians who will be able to afford this will be those shilling for fast food burgers.

If MySpace allowed external publishers to participate it could be a win-win-win for musicians, MySpace and Web publishers.

Source:CenterNetworks

Earlier today, Automattic announced that they acquired blog commenting service IntenseDebate. We’ve covered IntenseDebate a number of times including a technical interview on HTMLCenter. I was able to grab a couple of minutes with marketing director Michael Koenig and he agreed to answer some questions regarding the acquisition. The conversation is below.

Allen: Were you shopping for an acquisition when Automattic came calling?

Michael: We were not actively shopping for a sale. We believe that IntenseDebate has a very solid value proposition and were quite optimistic about our chances of success in the market. The opportunity to join the Automattic team, however, clearly accelerated our ability to put IntenseDebate in front of a much wider audience. It’s not everyday that you’re given such a great opportunity for quick, large-scale growth!

Allen: What synergies do you see with being part of the Automattic family?

Michael: Our goals have always been to enhance the commenting experience and provide the tools for blog publishers to benefit from insightful comments made around their posts. Joining the Automattic team gives us the chance to quickly integrate our value with all the Automattic products like Gravatar, Akismet, and of course WordPress. We’re pumped to hop onboard and help improve life in the blogosphere on a much, much larger scale. In addition, having access to the Automattic team’s expertise in scaling is invaluable as we look to improve IntenseDebate.

Michael: All around it’s exciting times here at IntenseDebate. Joining Automattic provides us with the opportunity to put IntenseDebate in front of more eyes than ever before. You can expect more blog readers to have IntenseDebate accounts and you will be able to comment on more blogs with IntenseDebate than you can imagine! It’s the perfect time to give us a try on your blog or website.

Allen: Can you share any financial details of the transaction?

Michael: Currently we’re not disclosing this information.

Allen: Will IntenseDebate remain in Colorado or will ya’all move to the Valley?

Michael: What’s amazing about the Automattic team is that they’ve got incredible talent spread across the globe. With that in mind, pull out the push-pins and add two more to the Automattic map. Co-founder and design wizard, Isaac Keyet, will be representin’ IntenseDebate out in Sweden for the time being, while we’ll be hanging out in Boulder, Colorado. We’re extremely proud to be part of the Boulder tech community and can’t imagine being away from TechStars and the great friends we’ve made.

Allen: How do you think this positions you against competitors Disqus and JS-Kit?

Michael: Our market is moving very quickly, as are our competitors. We firmly believe IntenseDebate is a comment system that brings valuable and insightful comments out of the muck of comment spam and into the light. The Automattic deal clearly gives us the opportunity to continue this on a much larger stage and at an accelerated rate. It’s about to get even more interesting!

Allen: How long do you expect this new private beta period to last?

Michael: IntenseDebate has been put back into a private beta while we ramp up our hardware and get ready for the main stage. While it’s always tough to give an ETA on something like this, the really irritating but necessary answer is; “as long as it takes to make sure the experience is a beneficial as possible for all our users.”

Michael: While, we don’t expect it to be too long – a week, two weeks…again, our goal is to make sure the value of the user experience is paramount and superior. We will be extending a limited but growing number of invitations as we proceed. I wouldn’t be surprised if we launch our shiny new WordPress plugin when we go live!

Allen: Will IntenseDebate become integrated into the installation of self-hosted Wordpress?

Michael: Certain elements of IntenseDebate will be rolled into WordPress Core, and WordPress.com. I recommend checking out Matt Mullenweg’s post IntenseDebate Goes Automattic for further details.

[My response aside, Matt comments: Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.]

Allen: What’s next now that you are part of the Automattic family?

Michael: For all of us here, IntenseDebate is clearly our baby. We’ve always dreamt of an opportunity like this. Our goal now at IntenseDebate is clearly to maximise the value that we can provide across the entire spectrum of the Automattic offerings. I know that Jon and Isaac are blown away by the thought that something they created and worked on tirelessly now has the potential to reach millions of people – as are Tom, Austin and I. It’s pretty wild!

So what’s next? This is just the beginning. IntenseDebate is about to get way more intense!

Best Buy has announced plans to acquire Napster today for $121 million in cash. From the release, the proposed acquisition includes Napster’s approximately 700,000 digital entertainment subscribers, its Web-based customer service platform, and innovative mobile capabilities. In conjunction with the definitive merger agreement, Napster CEO Chris Gorog and key members of senior management of Napster have entered into employment agreements, effective at closing, pursuant to which they have agreed to continue as the Napster leadership post-acquisition.

Napster, which recently launched one of the world’s largest MP3 stores, had fiscal 2008 revenue of $127.5 million, an increase of 15 percent over the prior fiscal year; a loss of $16.5 million, an improvement compared with a loss of $36.8 million the prior fiscal year; and positive cash flow for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008.

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