Recap of Recent Acquisitions

Huge amounts of money have been spent on acquisitions by big companies over the last two weeks. Tracking all those acquisitions is difficult because almost each day a new one had been announced. A recap:

1. On Friday eBay announced the acquisition of social bookmarking service StumbleUpon for $75 million. The reasons for the acquisition sound rather vague to me. eBay’s Michael Buhr:

   StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust

   New communities. Well, maybe those will actually be cool. Besides bidding for a book for my mum recently I can’t remember the last time I actually bought something for myself from eBay.

2. Media corporation CBS has bought one of my favourite services – Last.fm – for $280 million on Wednesday. This acquisition makes some more sense to me as both companies are in the media sector. Will we see and listen to radio and tv shows on Last.fm in the future? [via Read/Write Web]

   Right before the Last.fm deal CBS has also bought video blog WallStrip for $5 million. As you can guess from the name, WallStrip is focusing on news from the finance and stock market. WallStrip is good fun but CBS probably could have produced a similar show itself.

3. After the Doubleclick acquisition in April Google is strengthening its dominance in the advertisement market even more and has acquired FeedBurner for a rumoured sum of $100 million. FeedBurner is managing RSS feeds very comfortably and it is actually a really great service; I use it myself. So will we see Google ads in the feeds? Well, hopefully not.

   Google has also bought Spanish company Panoramio for an undisclosed sum on Wednesday. The company is geolocating photos and mapping them on Google Earth for example. [via Profy]

4. And at long last Fox Interactive Media has bought photo and video sharing sites Photobucket and Flektor for more than $300 million on Wednesday. [via TechCrunch]

I have probably missed a few acquisitions but those should be the most prominent ones. Lot’s of money spent. Too much?