Amazon Acquires Goodreads, Angers and Delights Booknerds Everywhere
I've got a lot of friends who are book authors -- I'm one, too -- and one thing we often ask friends and fans to do is rate and review our books on both Amazon and Goodreads. Why? Because both the online retailer and the social cataloging website are the go-to places for reading book reviews, which in turn do impact sales. But soon, you may only need to go to one of them when you want to write that gushing -- or scathing? -- review. According to a recent statement, Amazon's gone and bought Goodreads.
Pinterest Acquires Punchfork, Which is Basically Pinterest
Pinterest, a social network that lets people share things like recipes, has acquired Punchfork, a social network that lets people share recipes. This marks Pinterest's first acquisition of another company, which is a big step in any young Internet startup's life. It seems like only yesterday we were all clamoring to understand what exactly Pinterest was, but now it's all grown up.
Once Shining Social Media Star Digg Just Got Sold for $500,000, Folded Into News.me
Before the reddit you know and love, there was Digg, one of the first prominent social aggregators that really blew up and took the web by storm. Unfortunately, rarely anything popular on the Internet is meant to last (just ask Myspace), and when Digg underwent a redesign a couple of years ago, there was a huge amount of backlash and the community lost a lot of users and steam. A lot of those users actually went to reddit, which helped catapult reddit into being the new game in town. Now, sadly, Digg has sold for a relatively measly $500,000.
Skype to Acquire Group-Based Text Messaging Service GroupMe
Yesterday, Skype announced that it is acquiring group messaging service GroupMe. Though the terms of the deal were not made public, AllThingsD reports that Skype will pay in the ballpark of 85 million bucks for GroupMe, a company that was founded only around one year ago in 2010. GroupMe allows users to create phone groups with other people and send text messages throughout the group, so the acquisition makes sense for Skype, a service that has been recently focused on video-based services, but with the acquisition of GroupMe, can now shore up its text-based services.
Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion
After giving us a quick statistics lesson regarding Android's numbers (more than 150 million Android devices activated worldwide with over 550,000 devices activated every day) over on the Official Google Blog, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google has agreed to acquire Motorola for a cool $12.5 billion.
Motorola's "total commitment to Android in mobile devices" is one of the first reasons offered as to why Google decided pursue the acquisition, and they aim to create "amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers everywhere."
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