Tag Archive for ‘Acquisition’

I suspect the deal will still go through, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the price is a smidge lower than the initial offer.

As an aside, I receive significantly more interaction on Mastodon than I do on Twitter. And that’s with only about 60% of the followers. I’m sure that my experience isn’t representative of Twitter as a whole, but it seems like there are a lot of dormant accounts or accounts that don’t interact with the tweets in their timeline.

That’s not to say they’re a bunch of bot accounts, but of the monthly active users in my circle on Twitter, a good number of them don’t seem to be active at all.

➝ Source: reclaimthenet.org

From the press release:

Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

If you thought the coming attractions were entertaining, get your popcorn ready, this is going to be hilarious.

On a related note, although there were already plenty of reasons to leave Twitter, if this is what pushed you over the edge and you end up on an ActivityPub-powered service, you can follow me @mike@libertynode.net. And if it’s a Mastodon instance, I shared some thoughts late last year about my experience and some of the tools I’ve found useful.

➝ Source: prnewswire.com

I run much of my self-hosted services on Linode and absolutely love it. I hope Akamai doesn’t muck it up. I don’t necessarily have a reason to believe they will, but it’s always a little unnerving when a company you rely on is acquired.

➝ Source: linode.com

I expect Amazon Prime Video’s going to get a lot of new additions as a result of this. But I don’t think it’ll have any impact on my usage of the service.

➝ Source: macrumors.com

Adam Grossman, writing on Dark Sky’s weblog:

Today we have some important and exciting news to share: Dark Sky has joined Apple.

Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy.

There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.

Dark Sky for iOS will continue to be available and all of their other apps and services will be discontinued in the future.

I hope this goes as well as the Workflow acquisition did, but there are a lot of weather apps that are built on Dark Sky’s API. The service will continue to be available for existing developers until the end of next year, but all of those developers will have to move to another service before they’re cut off.

This must be more than simply updating the native iOS Weather app with an Apple-owned data provider.

I would really like to see Apple develop Dark Sky into a system-level API. So an application could ask for your current location’s weather conditions and/or forecast and display it within their app however they choose. Apple could present a dialog box asking you for permission to share the data with the app, and the developer could rely on the system for polling for updates. I see an API like this being useful for weather apps, journaling apps, calendar apps, and more.

➝ Source: blog.darksky.net

John Callaham, writing for iMore:

A new report claims Apple briefly considered putting in a bid to acquire Time Warner in late 2015. […]

The report from the Financial Times (paid subscription required) claims that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, talked about such a deal with Time Warner’s head of corporate strategy, Olaf Olafsson. However, those discussions never went past the early stages, according to the report.

Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety:

Pandora is acquiring San Francisco-based music subscription service Rdio, the Oakland, Calif.-based company announced Monday after the close of markets. The announcement came minutes after Variety exclusively reported about the deal being imminent.

The $75 million acquisition includes “technology and intellectual property” from Rdio, which will file for bankruptcy–presumably to rid itself of accumulated debt–and shut down its existing service in all markets.

I’ve never been an Rdio user, but I know that it was beloved by many. It’s always sad to see company’s like this shut down.

It’s all about AOL’s automated advertising technology. But on the technology journalism front, I wonder what this means for AOL’s content sites like TechCrunch and Engadget.