Leica began its takeover of Swiss view camera manufacturer Sinar all the way back in 2006, when the German company acquired a 51% stake in Sinar from Jenoptik. The real goal, however, was only truly achieved yesterday when both companies announced via press release that they had reached an acquisition deal.
Two of big names in the photography industry joined forces today as Shutterfly Inc announced its acquisition of premier photography and videography gear rental service BorrowLenses.
Yahoo! certainly doesn't shy away from acquiring companies it believes will help its cause. In some cases those acquisitions turn into long-term investments ala Flickr, in others the acquired company just sort of disappears.
The latest acquisition news out of the Yahoo! camp is that image-recognition startup IQ Engines is joining the Flickr team in order to help improve the organization and search features of the photo sharing site.
Art.com is "the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-end wall art." Zenfolio offers "online photography presentation and sales solutions for professional photographers and enthusiasts." Knowing that, Zenfolio's acquisition by Art.com announced earlier seems like a match made in sales heaven.
A major event occurred today in the creative industry landscape: Adobe has acquired Behance, a juggernaut portfolio-sharing service used by many photographers to showcase their work.
Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world, has agreed to acquire Demotix, a crowd-sourced citizen journalism photo agency that was founded in 2008. Corbis had already picked up a piece of the young agency through an investment last year, but now it has decided to purchase the whole company outright. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Well, that's quite a turn of events. Yesterday we reported that photo sharing app Color had denied rumors that the service would soon be shutting down. Based on the app's lack of users, we said that Color would need to find some traction -- and find it soon -- for the $41 million invested in it to pay off. Turns out they won't be needing a miracle after all, because they've reportedly already found one: the app will reportedly be acquired by Apple.
Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.
Social photo aggregation service Pixable has been acquired by Singaporean telecommunications company SingTel for $26.5 million. The service helps in photo browsing and discovery by aggregating photographs from your various social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flicker) and using a special ranking system to only show you the interesting images. Billing itself as a "photo inbox", users can also keep up with their friends' photographs on-the-go using the company's popular iOS and Android apps.
American private equity firm Carlyle Group announced today that it has agreed to drop $3.3 billion to acquire Getty Images from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. H&F purchased Getty Images just four years ago for $2.4 billion, so it seems that the stock photo company is doing decently well.