Facebook appears to be close to making another billion-dollar acquisition to once again ramp up its mobile efforts: according to three reports in the Israeli press at Calcalist and sister publication Ynet and The Marker (all in Hebrew), Facebook has approached Waze, the social mapping and traffic app maker, and is now in advanced due dilligence on a deal that Calcalist puts at between $800 million and $1 billion. The negotiations between the social network and crowdsourced mapping app apparently began six months ago.
We have been digging too and have picked up confirmation from a source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported first by the Calcalist is accurate. The only issue right now, the source said, is whether to keep Waze in Israel or whether to take it to the U.S., as Facebook did with two previous Israel acqusitions. Those were of feature phone interface developer Snaptu (bought for up to $70 million in March 2011) and facial recognition specialist Face.com (bought in June 2012 for $50-60 million).
But! Facebook and Waze have already come back to us with flat non-responses. “We do not comment on rumors or speculation about the business,†a spokesperson at Waze told TechCrunch. The company tells me that currently has over 47 million active users â€" more than double what it had in July last year when it reported 20 million.
“We won’t comment on speculation,†a Facebook spokesperson said.
If the rumors are true, adding Waze to Facebook makes a lot of sense in some respects: Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, which now has 751 million monthly active users as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year. That puts mobile on a faster track at the moment than Facebook’s desktop business, which currently has 1.11 billion MAUs, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
The most recent of its movements on mobile services is Facebook Home, an Android-based launcher that lets a user embed a connection into their Facebook social graph across their entire mobile experience with services like the ever-present Chat Heads. On another track, Facebook has for years now been building up a business around location-based check-ins, which also include local deals. A service like Waze, with social networking and crowdsourcing of information part of its DNA, makes perfect sense.
This would not be Facebook’s first 10-figure acquisition in the mobile space. Just over one year ago, leading up to its IPO, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, a deal that had a large portion in stock and ended up being worth more like $747 million when it finally got approved. That, too, gave Facebook a big leap into mobile services: while Instagram these days also has a handy way of viewing profiles on the desktop web, at its heart it is a wildly popular mobile app that for many works as a social network in its own right.
Nor would this be the first time that Waze has been in the crosshairs of acquisition rumors. One deal that was hotly reported by many, including us, involved Apple buying the mapping company. Of course that ended up not happening, although the two clearly were talking a lot because Waze ended up being a significant part of Apple Maps. The startup has raised $67 million in VC funding from backers including Kleiner Perkins, BlueRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, and Li Ka-shing.
Facebook earlier this year reported that it passed 1 billion users, and it’s likely that the next billion will likely not be in the U.S. Waze has around one-third of its users in the U.S. with the rest worldwide. Facebook’s past acquisition of another Israeli startup, Snaptu, which develops services for feature phones, was another deal that helped the social network tackle the burgeoning population of mobile users in developing markets; Waze, however, would help the company take aim specifically at smartphone users.
While Waze’s R&D is in Israel, its U.S. offices, and its CEO Noam Bardin, are based in (Facebook’s old haunt) Palo Alto, where the firm recently redecorated its front window.
Photo credit: Julie Mossler
H/T: Hillel Fuld
Waze is a social traffic & navigation app based on the world’s largest community of drivers sharing real time road info and contributing to the “common good†out there on the road. By simply driving around with Waze open users passively contribute traffic and other road data. Users can take a more active role by sharing road reports on accidents, police traps, or any other hazards along the way, helping to give other users in the area a ‘heads-up’...
February 1, 2004
NASDAQ:FB
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Face.com is helping people find photos, using our home grown best-in-breed facial recognition technologies. The first deployment of our tech is our Photo Finder application for Facebook, today’s largest photo sharing site, which scans public photos in your social network and suggests tags for untagged faces. face.com has offices in Tel Aviv and New York.
Snaptu (formerly Moblica) is both a product and a company–the goal of both is to significantly improve the way the world uses the mobile web. Specifically, our goal is to help millions of mobile users access the web easily and quicklyâ€â€regardless of the mobile phone they’re using. For mobile consumers our Snaptu application delivers a fast, fun and effective user experience for popular mobile Internet applications on virtually every mobile phone. For online service providers, media...
No comments:
Post a Comment