Mobile advertising company Smaato is set to become the latest technology startup to be acquired by Chinese investors, after the San Francisco firm announced that Beijing-based Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communication Group, an offline marketing organization, has agreed to buy it for $148 million. Founded in 2005, Smaato is a real-time advertising exchange for mobile sites and app developers. It operates

To accelerate its leading position in mobile advertising, Millennial Media (NYSE: MM) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nexage for approximately $107.5 million in cash and stock, subject to certain adjustments. Based in Boston, privately held Nexage is a leading provider of Real-Time-Bidding (RTB) technology that helps to automate the buying

Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) advertising solutions for digital marketers, and [x+1], Inc., a leading provider of programmatic marketing and data management solutions, announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Rocket Fuel will acquire [x+1] in a cash and stock transaction, with an enterprise

LinkedIn just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Bizo (B2B Display Ad Platform), a company that helps advertisers reach businesses and professionals. LinkedIn says the deal is worth around $175 million — 90 percent cash and 10 percent stock. Bizo spun out from business directory ZoomInfo back in 2008. It raised a

Just a week after Yahoo’s Q2 earnings call, in which CEO Marissa Mayer said she was looking to position Yahoo as a “mobile-first company,” the M&A bug has hit again: Yahoo is acquiring mobile analytic platform and ad marketplace Flurry. Publishers sell their ad inventory through Flurry’s platform or buy traffic from applications, which also provides analytics to

WhatsApp has vowed never to sell ads. It collects no information about users beyond their phone numbers. So you’re right to wonder why it was just acquired by the world’s second-largest mobile advertising company. “From the day we started the company, we always felt that doing advertising in our product would be a very wrong thing to

Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, delivered a keynote speech at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, in which she announced the firm’s acquisition of Aviate, the launch of the company’s News Digest app service, and the release of its new ad products. Mayer’s first announcement was that Yahoo has snapped up Aviate, which makes

According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday to decide whether to approve a $1.1 billion all-cash offer for New York-based blogging site Tumblr. Yahoo has been mulling some kind of deal with the hip New York-based blogging site, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition. Sources said