SAP To Acquire Ariba Fo...

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report  citing FactSet data. The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP. The deal will be  funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions  in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce. The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle. “The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement . “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Google Closes Acquisiti...

As we reported would happen yesterday , Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion. As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android ecosystem: while Motorola will be making devices using the platform, it will also remain open. Page, interestingly, uses his blog post announcing the deal to focus mainly on the mobile aspects of the acquisition — Motorola also has a substantial business as a media hardware vendor, making things like set-top boxes and other equipment and technology to deliver digital video services. “The phones in our pockets have become supercomputers that are changing the way we live,” he writes, emphasizing what the future might hold for mobile technology and likening it to Star Trek made real (and those Google Glasses really do look very Star Trek ). “It’s a great time to be in the mobile business…I’m confident Dennis [Woodhouse] and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page writes. In announcing the acquisition, Page describes Woodhouse as “phenomenal” at team-building, and notes under him, U.S. revenues went up to $17.5 billion from $10.8 billion in less than three years. “Dennis has always been a committed partner to our customers and I know he will be an outstanding leader of Motorola,” he wrote. Now come more questions: what Motorola assets will Google hold on to, and what will it cut off in the new-look Motorola Mobility — and what will that say about Google’s bigger strategy as an integrated tech player? And will employees go in the process, as we have heard they will?

Larry Page Spotted Wear...

There hasn’t been a whole lot of news coming out of the Google Zeitgeist event taking place in a posh hotel on the outskirts of London this week, but Google’s making some other news in England: its CEO Larry Page has been spotted wearing Google Glasses. The pictures of Page wearing the super-funky augmented reality eyewear are possibly the first — although his Google co-founder Sergey Brin has also been seen wearing them   in the wild . Today’s pictures come courtesy of Google employee Jason Mayes, who posted them — where else? — on Google + . “My life is now complete – met Larry Page today! Thank you for visiting EMEA,” he wrote alongside his pictures. Nice to Google Glass has been one of the most talked-about new projects at Google for a long time. It’s one of the company’s first big forays into cutting-edge hardware. Other products it’s been reported to be working on are integrating more Google TV functions into set-top boxes and a home-entertainment system . With the company closing the acquisition of Motorola today , we are likely to get more visibility on what Google’s plans will be for developing more hardware. That, of course, is a strength at Motorola. Hardware is also something that Page himself highlighted recently in his CEO’s letter.

Facebook’s Acquisition ...

Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma , which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms — an area that it had said it’s admittedly weak in. The price was not disclosed. With the deal, Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps. Karma’s chief executive Lee Linden and its co-founder Ben Lewis were behind Tapjoy, a company that became a huge force in distributing and making money from mobile games. Both he and Lewis were product managers at Google and Microsoft. Linden and Lewis have known each other since they were kids and have been building companies together for a couple years. Note: This was a real product acquisition, not a lower-priced, talent-based one. Karma had done one venture round with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. The sense that we’re hearing from sources is that Karma will get Facebook’s 901 million users at its feet and more power behind building partnerships with other brands.  It’s not clear whether Karma will be left alone to run autonomously like Instagram or whether it will become a Facebook-branded product. Last year, Facebook acquired an early group messaging app called Beluga and turned it into Facebook Messenger. This acquisition makes sense for a couple of reasons. Facebook needs all the help it can get in making its mobile platform produce revenue. Linden and Lewis built Tapjoy into what became a $100 million annual runrate business for app distribution and monetization. Now they’ve turned their attention toward mobile commerce. Facebook hasn’t figured out how to make money from mobile apps quite yet. It’s starting to show sponsored stories in the mobile news feed, but it doesn’t have that many opportunities to make payments revenue from third-party mobile developers because it’s blocked from taking a revenue share on iOS. Android offers some possibilities but it’s quite complicated to build a rival app ecosystem like Amazon has done over the past few years with the Kindle. Facebook has tried its hand at gifting before, although it was the virtual kind. It abandoned its gifts store in favor of working on a more broad-based virtual currency offering called Credits that would power purchases of virtual gifts and goods from other developers. It also has tried direct commerce with its Groupon competitor Deals, but obviously that is a very expensive model to operate and scale if you look at Groupon’s margins. But the physical good gifting that Karma specialized in could be a perfect fit. Facebook already knows who your friends, when they have birthdays, and their interests. It could suggest gifts to give and who to give them too, let users pay with their credit card or credits, and take a healthy cut. We had heard a few weeks ago that Lewis was considering taking personal time to travel the world and step down from running Karma with Linden, but apparently we were wrong. He is definitely joining Facebook with the rest of the team. Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.” Karma also had a post on its own blog: We founded Karma with the goal of adding the sentiment and meaning back into gift giving. That’s what Karma is all about. That’s what the Karma team set out to achieve. Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level. We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow. Simply put, together we can celebrate life’s important moments in ways we could not before. A word of heartfelt thanks to our partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us share Karma with so many people. Sincerely, Karma Co-founders Lee & Ben

From TC50 Winners To A ...

I’ve been on a journey through the past as Disrupt NYC ( tickets here ) draws closer, sifting through past Disrupt and TC50 startups with the hopes of getting a clear update on the accomplishments, the trials, and the milestones between then and now. The stories have been amazing, but one of the most incredible tales of growth and success I’ve yet to hear lies with Redbeacon . The company first won top prize at TC50 in 2009, and has since gone on to raise a $7.4 million round led by Mayfield Fund and Venrock (purely bootstrapped up until then), and ultimately found themselves in the midst of an acquisition by Home Depot . I spoke with co-founders Aaron Lee and Yaron Binur to hear the impressive tale straight from the horses’ mouths. Here’s the interview in its entirety: TechCrunch: So tell me what’s happened between TC50 and now? What was the TC50 experience like? Redbeacon: Well, the interesting part of TC50 is that you have to launch on stage. We had an awesome product and we were excited but no one had used it up until that moment. We launched in the Bay Area and spent the next 8 months iterating. Even though we launched at TC50 with no users beforehand, we started collecting data which was extremely useful. We skipped the whole angel round with the small amount of money we could raise, including our TC50 prize, and then eventually raised $7.4 million. I think there were three factors that went into getting that $7.4M round: our willingness to put in our own money, the great data we were generating, and our win at TC50. The experience of launching our product on stage with TechCrunch and getting interest and appetite from investors made that first round of funding a lot easier to get. It opened up a lot of doors for us. When you have all those things come together — great data, a great team, a great product, and TechCrunch — it makes that round easy to raise and it makes it easy to get a lot out of it. TC: Did you feel like, after TC50, you kind of had your choice when it came to shopping for investors? Redbeacon: Absolutely. We were very picky and felt like we had a lot of choices with investors. Our investors were rock solid. Without them, the acquisition with Home Depot would have been impossible. Once we got that money, up until then we only had three or four people in the company. We could then finally grow the team and grow geographically. We went from the Bay Area to 11 different metros, and as we scaled and grew we arrived at one of the most important things we could learn. With the growth of our team and product we needed to focus on new products. We had originally launched a very generic product. All services. What we saw from the data as we scaled was that 80 percent of our requests were for home services, and not the other categories. As a consumer, they didn’t understand the idea of local services. They couldn’t make a connection between wedding planners and roofers. By focusing on home services, we had a clearer brand and could specialize our product in useful ways. Redbeacon then became all about my home or maintaining my home. That was obviously a huge shift for us. From that point we started seeing a lot of traction and growth. We started introducing key features that were only possible with that focus. We also went mobile, which was huge, both on the consumer and the provider side. We saw huge growth on the revenue side throughout 2011. And in January of this year, Home Depot understood the opportunity and that the space is huge. They also saw that Redbeacon is best to take it over. One thing you can see in the marketplace is that a younger generation is moving from DIY to do it for me. Since the acquisition in January, we’re already scaling and leveraging the business. It’s integrated with the shopping experience at Home Depot, and we have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline too. TC: One thing I notice during Disrupt is that the Q&A is particularly brutal. A company’s entire stance can quickly be brought down by an Arrington or a Wilson or a Mayer. How did you guys feel about the Q&A experience, and do you think that session might have actually improved your product in the early stages? Redbeacon: We learned three main things from the Q&A. The first was the chicken and the egg rule. We had a two-sided marketplace and it’s hard to bootstrap and scale the business keeping things even on both sides. That was a big worry for them. But that put it in context in a way that was really useful: we learned that the provider side is much easier than the consumer side. They list themselves, we know how to get a hold of them, so if we come to them with real jobs and work they’re very interested in engaging. That session helped us identify that issue and while we spent eight months iterating we were trying to figure out how to balance out both sides before expanding. Another thing that came out of the Q&A was going mobile. This was back in 2009, so the idea was still relatively new, but it turned out to be key. Our engagement on mobile is huge. The last thing we learned was how we should roll out and scale: should it be city by city, nationally by one vertical? We tested out a lot of different ways, but a local business can’t go national in one day. It was useful to hear their concern about that and think through it. TC: We have a ton of entrepreneurs and hackers heading out to New York today and tomorrow. You’ve been there before; so what advice would you give to these guys getting ready to launch on the Disrupt stage? Redbeacon: Along with having experience at Disrupt, I’m also an angel investor and a mentor at 500Startups. A few things to learn is to keep your product and do less rather than more. Launch and iterate quickly. And do tons of interviews early on. Understand how people are using your product and run lots of tests. Don’t make it a stealth product because there’s not enough feedback that way. It’s also important to remember that raising money is great but it’s a means to an end. Stay focused on the product and the users. TC: So generally speaking, how do you think that Disrupt helped build Redbeacon? Redbeacon: I think there are four main ways. It helped us raise money, as I said before. It also helps early on with business development. It’s hard for large companies to trust you when you’re running on your own money. But having won Disrupt opened doors and gave us credibility. Some of our early partnerships told us that after hearing about us on TechCrunch, it instilled a lot of confidence in the team and the product. Disrupt also helped us with media relations, not only with TechCrunch but across the board. And it also helped with hiring and recruiting. People were excited to be a part of a team that had won at TC50. Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler , along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer , Sarah Tavel , Fred Wilson , and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge. If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here . Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley . You can find the full agenda here .