Consolidation seems to be the name of the game with mergers and acquisitions being announced this week. One in the mobile space which one in the social networking space.
Altruist Acquires Mobile2win India
Mobile2win India a VC backed VAS company in the SMS and mobile marketing space has been acquired by Altruist Group, a wireless voice services provider based out of Chandigarh. Altruist Group currently has a company in Altruist Technologies which operates a Mobile Social Networking Service and JobsOnPhone, a phone based recruitment service provider.
Mobile2win India had raised funding from Nexus India Capital and Norwest Venture Partners who had invested $15 million in 2006.
What will be the impact of this deal?
According to the release with this consolidation, the Group turnover will exceed Rs 200 Crores (~USD 40 mn) this fiscal. The companies shall continue to operate independently but they will take advantage of their complementary Voice, SMS, WAP solutions and offer it to all the leading mobile operators, media companies and brands.
What kind of deal is this?
As part of this deal existing investors in M2W will get shares in the Altruist Group and Rajat Jain, who is currently the MD and CEO of Mobile2Win will now join the Altruist Group board.
Apnacircle.com Merges With France Business Networking Site Viadeo
ApnaCircle.com the Sabeer Bhatia backed social networking website has announced its merger with Viadeo the france based business networking site.
What will be the impact of this merger?
This merger would help in expanding the horizon of Apnacircle which till now has been pretty much under the radar as far as Indian Social networks are concerned and will also help the registered users of ApnaCircle to be linked to more than 6.5 million members of Viadeo.
ApnaCircle has a current membership of more than 300K from all over India and with this merger Apnacircle hopes to get this number to 1 million by the mid of 2010. As per this deal Viadeo will retain the name of ApnaCirlce.com.
I can’t believe it that ApnaCircle is actually merging. I mean it was one of the most pathetic social networks I ever registered to.