After reading the Top 10 Worst Internet Acquisitions, Part 1 and Part 2, I could not help but come up with this list and offer you the following ten “best” Internet acquisitions of all time.
Criteria:
- My background and experience lies in search, video and online advertising, so naturally there is a skew there.
- Expensive is relative, but not overpaying is a major criteria.
- People matter in all deals, so a good “acq-hire” is sometimes worth more than a deal that is accretive to earnings.
- Take out a competition? Always good!
- Buy low, sell high? We’re impressed.
- Allows parent / acquirer to enter a whole new market with one deal? You have our attention.
- We’re avoiding partial acquisitions, otherwise Google’s 5% investment in AOL for $1B would be high on this list, for defensive purposes.
- Also, we will try to avoid speculation: ie. YouTube/Google is way too young to really be judged.
- To avoid a disclosure-laced post, all disclaimers, FYI, etc. are posted at the end.
- Last but not least: like with all lists, I am sure I am forgetting a big one, so feel free to comment; as with all posts, comments are open but moderated to avoid for spam… I’ll check in later and approve everything that is not spam: good, bad and ugly.
Go to the first one HERE.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterMINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 24 /PRNewswire/ — Panasonic, the market and technology leader in Plasma TV, is giving shoppers at the country’s largest shopping mall this holiday weekend a crystal clear view of what will be atop many holiday gift lists this season — big screen Panasonic Plasma HDTVs.
Panasonic’s Plasma Tour will stop at the Mall of America beginning Black Friday to give consumers a look at the 103″ world’s largest Plasma HDTV. The 103″ Plasma will highlight a display of Panasonic’s entire range of best-selling Plasma HDTVs (from 37″ - 65″) that have been significantly more accessible this holiday season.
“What better place to show people the undeniable power and beauty of a Panasonic Plasma TV than at the country’s biggest mall on the biggest shopping weekend of the year?” said Andrew Nelkin, Panasonic’s Display Group Vice President. “Black Friday signals the start of the most important selling season on our calendar. It is a time when people are inundated with information from a wide range of sources on what is best to buy. We feel that consumers can make the most educated purchasing decisions by actually seeing first hand how a Panasonic Plasma delivers the best high definition viewing experience for sports, movies and video games and talking to one of our flat panel HDTV experts face-to-face.”
According to the Consumer Electronics Association(1), sales of flat-panel TVs are expected to top $7.3 billion this year, up 85 percent from a year ago.
Half of consumers surveyed said their next TV set will be a flat panel. A recent Opinion Research Corporation study(2) of more than 1,000 adults found that nearly 75% of respondents feel buying a Plasma HDTV is more affordable/feasible than one year ago.
About Panasonic
Based in Secaucus, N.J., Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company is a Division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (NYSE: MC - News) and the hub of Panasonic’s U.S. marketing, sales, service and R&D operations. Information about Panasonic products is available at http://www.panasonic.com.
A Belgian court said on Friday it would wait until after the new year to decide whether to cancel an injunction forbidding Web search leader Google Inc. from reproducing extracts from Belgian press reports.
Google, which faces a parallel case in a U.S. court filed by Agence France-Presse, argued on Friday that the injunction, granted by Brussels’s Tribunal des Referes, should be cancelled.
“It will be after the Christmas holidays,” the judge told lawyers after a three-hour hearing during which Google lawyers argued that the Belgian Google News service did not infringe on copyright laws.
Lawyers for Copiepresse, an organisation which manages copyrights for French and German language newspapers and which brought the case, said that Google had no right to make any copy of content without prior consent.
Read more.
This is a good point:
Mainstream newspapers are up against dwindling circulation and shrinking advertising revenues, but college papers have become hot commodities.
Spurred by research indicating that about 76 percent of the 6 million full-time US undergraduates read their campus papers at least occasionally, big corporations and advertisers are latching on to student-run publications.
One of the most notable examples of the trend occurred in late summer, when a subsidiary of MTV, one of the country’s best-known youth brands and part of the Viacom entertainment empire, bought College Publisher, a company that runs websites for about 450 college papers.
But it’s interesting to note that readership of newspapers then falls off after graduation. You enter the workforce and are bound to access the info on a computer or wireless device, and not papers. I know what you are thinking: young professionals (who just graduated and commute to work via public transportation, for example) might be prone to read dailies on the bus, subway etc.
Right?
Not so. A few years ago, a major media company launched free, lifestyle dailies and gave them away on buses, subways. Soon thereafter, it went online-only.
Read more.
