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New Media News Every Morning

Kaboose acquires the largest online parenting club in the UK

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new media newsKaboose, the largest independent family-focused online media company in the U.S., has acquired Bounty.com, a leading family destination and parenting club online in the UK, for $140 million.

The acquisition of Bounty.com is expected to complement Kaboose’s other sites like BabyZone, ParentZone, AmazingMoms and TwoPeasInABucket.

Hopefully, this will give the Toronto-based company a better fighting chance against established players in the family-friendly demographic like Nickelodeon, Walt Disney, and J&J’s BabyCenter.

However, both parties declined to deal with the media until the equity-refinancing deal for $115 million is completed.

Why $140 million? Bounty.com is not only the largest parenting club in the UK with 2.4 million members but also the largest database of young families in Europe. Not to mention its strong partnerships with leading multinational companies like P&G, Unilever, J&J, and Kimberly-Clark.

Originally posted on November 16, 2007 @ 12:39 pm

AOL acquires Q&A service Yedda

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yedda.pngAOL has acquired Yedda, Inc., a social search Questions and Answer service. Yedda will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Founded in 2006, Yedda employs patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question. Yedda’s semantic matching technology intelligently routes questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can “syndicate” their expertise and spark a community-wide dialogue of people invited to discuss and learn from each other’s experiences.

Using Yedda’s technology, AOL will incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate “Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming months.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Originally posted on November 12, 2007 @ 11:22 am

Discovery Communications to acquire HowStuffWorks.com

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901am.comDiscovery Communications, a leading nonfiction media company, has announced that it has agreed to acquire HowStuffWorks, the leading online source of high quality, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works.

Acquiring HowStuffWorks further strengthens Discovery Communications’ global position as the number-one nonfiction media company dedicated to providing knowledge and satisfying curiosity across all platforms.

In addition to an editorial team that creates new content every day, HowStuffWorks leverages the exclusive digital rights to over 30,000 books, 800,000 images and more than 180,000 maps as it explains the world from brains to bats, from rocket engines to roller coasters, from hybrid cars to HDTV, and countless other topics.

“Contextually integrating engaging clips drawn from Discovery’s vast video library of more than 100,000 hours of programming with the family-friendly and evergreen collection of expertly written articles on HowStuffWorks will ultimately deliver an accurate ‘video wikipedia.’ Information-seeking consumers will find a rich, multimedia experience to answer the world’s questions, and our business partners will find new opportunities to reach targeted audiences of engaged consumers,” said Jeff Arnold, who will continue his role as CEO of HowStuffWorks.

Originally posted on October 15, 2007 @ 10:49 am

Disaboom acquires Lovebyrd.com

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disaboom.pngDisaboom, Inc., the first online community for people living with or directly affected by disabilities or functional limitations, announced the acquisition of Lovebyrd.com, an online dating and social networking service. Consideration for the deal consisted of part cash/part stock of Disaboom.

Lovebyrd.com provides a dating community and friendship network for single men and women living with disabilities around the world. Following the acquisition, Disaboom intends to re-brand Lovebyrd.com under the Disaboom umbrella and to immediately offer it as a free service within disaboom.com.

Originally posted on October 11, 2007 @ 10:20 pm

Msnbc.com acquires Newsvine

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newsvine1.gifMsnbc.com has acquired social news site Newsvine.com to “foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news.”

Both parties declined to disclose the value of this all-cash transaction. Moreover, msnbc intends to keep Newsvine an independent site and will only help expand its user base.

“We want to understand [Newsvine’s technology and processes], but we don’t have any agenda. Where companies get into trouble is when they try to impose big-company standards in small companies,” said MSNBC Interactive News president Charlie Tillinghast in a news release.

According to Newsvine Blog, this acquisition means so many good things such as increased exposure for Newsvine writers, bigger community, improvements on speed and reliability, more news, and slightly bigger staff.

Originally posted on October 8, 2007 @ 10:27 am