Acquisition Targets Amazon has been slow to acquire companies. Amazon acquired dpreview.com, a London-based digital photography review site in May 2007. Amazon needs to use acquisitions to enter businesses that have a higher profitability dynamic in their business models. For example, Amazon could consider acquiring on-demand, customized product creation company CafePress. CafePress.com is a growing
Acquisition Strategy Microsoft acquired Medstory and aQuantive this year. Actually both were very good acquisitions. Online Health is a large segment with 31% of the total U.S. Internet users or 55.3 million U.S. Internet audience visiting health information sites each month during the first quarter of 2007. Buying aQuantive was a shrewd move. With the
Introduction MSN is the all in one Internet portal of Microsoft. The Company has divided its core business into three divisions – Platform products and services division, Business division and Entertainment and Devices Division. The online services group comes under the first division. Microsoft, through MSN, has significant presence in the online business and owns
SM: Was Saber under American Airlines or on its own? JK: Saber, by that time, was a public company. It was not controlled by American Airlines anymore. The Chief Financial officer at United had the idea that the airline industry needed to form its own competitor to Travelocity and Saber, otherwise the industry would be
Acquisition Targets Gannett doesn’t have much of a presence in the Online Personals or Dating space. It could look at acquiring a site as a large portion of the newspaper personals have shifted from print to the Internet and Gannett should preserve its share of the pie. Gannett could consider acquiring sites like, OkCupid, Engage,
Acquisition Targets Over the years, News Corp. has been acquiring businesses that would help it close the gaps in its portfolio. The MySpace acquisition helped it to leapfrog in the social networking space and with the recent acquisition of Dow Jones it will emerge as a leading player in the financial news and information space.
M&A and VC Activity In April 2007, Comcast acquired online movie ticket destination Fandango for $200 million. Fandango is a fast growing site with about 5 million unique monthly visitors. Founded in 2000 by seven of the top 10 largest U.S. theater chains, Fandango services movie ticketing for more than 15, 000 screens. Recently, Blockbuster
SM: What came after Alewife and VMW? AA: I did VMW in 1994 – 1995, and in 1996 I came back to MIT. I started the Raw effort in 1996. Looking at processor design, we felt that in another 10 years we would have chips with billions of transistors and we wanted to discover how