Buyout Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Nuance to acquire rival Vlingo

by Mike Schramm (Dec 21st, 2011)

Nuance, the company behind the Dragon apps and a whole slew of other popular software suites, has decided to acquire its rival Vlingo, another voice-to-text software developer. VentureBeat says it's for an undisclosed sum, but even though the two companies have sued and counter-sued over a ...

Calcalist: Apple to buy Israeli company Anobit

by Michael Rose (Dec 20th, 2011)

As noted here & here last week, the Israeli business daily Calcalist has been tracking the story of Apple's purported buyout of the flash/DSP technology company Anobit. Today the site reports that the deal is good to go, and that Anobit's employees are being told of the new ownership. To ...

Digital Chocolate buys Sandlot Games

by Mike Schramm (Aug 17th, 2011)

Mobile game developer Digital Chocolate, one of the biggest developers on the App Store, has acquired Sandlot Games, makers of Cake Mania and a few other popular App Store titles. Sandlot has offices in Seattle and Eastern Europe, and Digital Chocolate says it plans to use the developer to ...

EA iOS revenues up 100%, Firemint mentioned

by Mike Schramm (May 5th, 2011)

EA held a conference call yesterday to talk about the past year's revenues, and it's no surprise that the mobile division is doing great. The mobile revenue total was $70 million for the last quarter, up 27 percent from the same period last year. It doesn't sound like things were quite as busy as ...

AT&T to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion

by Mike Schramm (Mar 20th, 2011)

Reports are coming in from all over this morning that AT&T has bought fellow domestic cell carrier T-Mobile USA. According to the press release, AT&T will acquire the company from Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG in a deal that's valued at $39 billion in cash and stock. The transaction is ...

Rovio picks up $42 million in first funding round

by Mike Schramm (Mar 10th, 2011)

Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds, has nabbed a total of $42 million in a first round of venture capitalist funding. This isn't necessarily quite that big a payday for the company -- while that's obviously a lot of money, the company has reportedly already pulled in about $70 million from app ...

Xmarks finds new owner, isn't going anywhere

by Mike Schramm (Dec 15th, 2010)

Look at that -- while I was sad to hear that my favorite bookmark syncing service Xmarks would be calling it quits after trying and failing to find a profitable business model, its users stepped in to support the service, and at the beginning of this month, Xmarks announced that it would be ...

Google buys firm of former Apple employees

by Mike Schramm (Apr 22nd, 2010)

Google's purchase of a firm staffed with former Apple employees is surrounded by mystery, according to AppleInsider. Agnilux is a small San Jose startup founded by a few former Apple employees, most of whom left the mothership right around the time of the P.A. Semi acquisition. Other than that, ...

iPad tech specs reveal Cortex A8, 256MB Ram, PowerVR SGX 535

by Mike Schramm (Apr 6th, 2010)

Now that the iPad has been out and tested for a few days, developers have a much better idea of what's exactly under that perfectly-formed hood. Turns out the A4 processor is modeled on the Cortex A8, a fact which was not only expected, but gives a little extra credence to the theory that chipmaker ...

Munster: Apple developing a search engine

by Mike Schramm (Apr 1st, 2010)

The great prognosticator Gene Munster (who spends his days working as an analyst at Piper Jaffray) has another guess at Apple's future for us: a search engine. He says there's a 70% chance that Apple will create its own search engine within the next five years -- right after that HDTV that he ...

Ngmoco picks up $25 million in funding, buys Freeverse

by Mike Schramm (Feb 22nd, 2010)

TechCrunch is reporting that iPhone game company Ngmoco has just picked up $25 million in another round of fundraising, which they used to buy out Freeverse, one of the most storied Mac game developers (and recently, iPhone game developers) on the block. The two companies were already close -- ...

A media company seemingly lacking a business model? Maybe Apple should buy it...

by David Chartier (Aug 22nd, 2006)

...or not. Jan's post about the latest brewing business suggestion that Apple should buy YouTube betrays a strange trend in the news and blogosphere. Apparently, if a media-related company is either floundering or doing well but lacking a sure-fire business model, they're fresh meat for an Apple ...

AMD acquires ATI for $5.4 billion

by David Chartier (Jul 24th, 2006)

AMD, the #2 CPU maker in the world, has announced a purchase of ATI, a leading graphics card manufacturer, for $5.4 billion. IMG has more details on the buyout and the business end of things, but we're more interested in finding out what exactly this means for the Mac market. ATI currently supplies ...

Powerlogix bought by OWC

by Fabienne Serriere (Mar 9th, 2006)

Well I think I found one of the reasons why no one replied to my recent plea for help with my PowerLogix card. It seems that PowerLogix has just been acquired by OWC. Other World Computing is a company that sells a mix of its own gear and third party hardware (including PowerLogix and other ...

Disney buys Pixar: Good or bad?

by Dave Caolo (Jan 25th, 2006)

Yesterday's big news, of course, was Disney's buyout of Pixar. Steve got more money than he could use in 10,000 lifetimes, a seat on Disney's board of directors and boatload of stock. But what does this mean for the films that are yet to be born of this union? I'm hoping that the Disney suits will ...