Sigma's reputation has skyrocketed in recent times after the introduction of its highly regarded Art series of lenses for a number of mounts. It looks like the success has attracted the attention of at least one major suitor.
Canon reportedly tried to acquire Sigma recently, but had its offer rejected because Sigma hopes to continue its growth as an independent company.
Eyefi is best known for its Wi-Fi-capable memory cards that allow photos to be beamed to computers and mobile devices directly from cameras. Wi-Fi is appearing as a built-in feature in more and more cameras, though, and Eyefi has been pivoting its business in recent days.
Today the company jumped into the world of mobile apps by announcing that it has acquired OKDOTHIS, the photography inspiration app and community that was created in 2012 by photographer Jeremy Cowart and the Nashville-based app startup Aloompa.
DJI announced today that is has acquired a minority stake in Hasselblad, forming a strategic partnership between a well-known brand in high-end cameras and the best-known brand in camera drones.
Sony's juggernaut image sensor business may soon grow even more thanks to a name brand acquisition. The company is reportedly finalizing a deal with Toshiba to buy its sensor business for about $164 million.
SanDisk just succeeded in its mission to get bought out. Hard drive maker Western Digital announced today that it has agreed to acquire SanDisk in a deal worth about $19 billion in cash and stock. If all goes well, the deal will close in the third quarter or 2016.
If you're a fan of Outdoor Photographer magazine and have been hearing murmurings of the publications demise over the past day, here's some good news: the magazine isn't dead -- it was just sold.
Back in April, the lighting company Photoflex unexpectedly announced that it would be closing shop after 30 years in the business, to the disappointment of many. Later that month, the struggling company revealed that it was working on a deal to allow the brand to live on. They succeeded.
Photoflex announced yesterday that it has been acquired by the lighting company PromarkBRANDS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This past Monday, GoPro announced that it has acquired Kolor, a French company that's pioneering the use of 360-degree cameras for immersive virtual reality.
Canon Europe has acquired a London-based startup company called Lifecake, which builds a photo-sharing app that's marketed toward parents of young kids. The service, which launched back in 2013, claims to offer "time travel for parents."
Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera module company that is trying to revolutionize the mobile photography industry with state-of-the-art cameras that are extremely small yet powerful enough to lead "the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets."
LinkedIn announced today that it has shelled out $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda, the popular online education site that is teeming with material for photographers. As part of the acquisition, LinkedIn is now the new owners of, among many other things, 500+ photography courses and 24,000+ photography tutorial videos.
A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.
Last year Nikon announced that it had set aside $1.96 billion for mergers and acquisitions into new industries in order to diversity from the camera industry that had grown the 98-year-old company to greatness.
The Japanese company is now using a portion of that cash pile on its first major expansion purchase: a £259M (~$400M) acquisition of the Scottish retinal imaging firm Optos.
Google has acquired Odysee, an app by a small startup called Nimbuz Inc. that had been working on a smartphone software for backing up and sharing photos and videos. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Stock photography giant Shutterstock announced today that it has agreed to acquire the UK-based press photo agency Rex Features for $33 million in a mostly cash deal.
VSCO may be trying to branch out from film emulation software and enter the business of photo books. The company has announced that it has acquired photo book printing startup Artifact Uprising.
Here's some news that flew under our radar late last year: in December 2014, a family in Minnesota became the majority owner of Polaroid through a $70 million deal.
Amidst a messy legal battle over copyrights to Vivian Maier's now famous work, a gallery in Toronto has acquired the entire collection of negatives owned by Jeffrey Goldstein.
Reporters all over the world are digging for nuggets in documents that were leaked in Sony's hacking. Here's one of the interesting finds: back in March, Snapchat secretly purchased a company that builds stealthy camera glasses.
Adobe has acquired stock photo giant Fotolia to add a serious stock photography and video marketplace to the Creative Cloud. The price it paid is roughly $800 million in cash.
Having a great mobile experience is key in a day and age when a huge chunk of the online experience is had on a smartphone screen, and Yahoo! is continuing its march towards a great mobile experience today by acquiring the photo app maker Cooliris.
It was recently announced that PhotoDrive, a popular photo uploading service powered by Flickr, is getting shut down. The reason? According to the latest Flickr blog post, Yahoo! has hired Jeff Bargmann, the man behind the growing photo start-up, in an effort to add some more human talent to the Flickr team.
It came as quite a surprise to everyone – including their own employees – when Calumet camera stores went out of business quite literally overnight. As is to be expected in such a downfall, much of their capital has been sold off in hopes to gain back as much as possible. But, as much as anything else, the fall of Calumet has left people wondering what will happen to the brand that many photographers came to know and trust.
Apple might be intent on making high-speed burst mode a 'thing' in future iPhone models, given that the Cupertino tech giant just acquired a one-man startup known for building an app that could push the iPhone to 20-30fps burst without sacrificing resolution.
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.
When Facebook spent the staggering amount of $1 billion on the Instagram acquisition, people the world over thought they were crazy for throwing that kind of money on an app that, at the time, hadn't generated any revenue.
Well, that acquisition turned out pretty well for CEO Zuckerberg, who has since allegedly turned his sights on Snapchat, only to have an even more ludicrous offer spurned. How much more ludicrous, you ask? Apparently, Snapchat recently turned down a $3 billion offer from the social media giant.
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.
It wasn't so long ago that Instagram was in the business of being bought, but now that the app has the power of Facebook behind it, as Bob Dylan would say: The Times They Are a-Changin'. In addition to the recent update to the company's brand guidelines that banned the use of "Insta" and "Gram" by connected apps (among other things), the company just made an acquisition of its own.
Yesterday we shared some news coming out of photographer Vincent LaForet's camp that the website service liveBooks -- which is used by many photographers -- was quite possibly on its way out. This after a month of silence and "knowledgeable sources" indicating that the US branch of the business was all but shut down.
A few hours after that news broke, however, we found out what was really happening: liveBooks has been acquired by the online event marketplace WeddingWire.
Back in December, Dropbox acquired the photo storage service Snapjoy, seemingly getting ready to jump head first into the cloud sharing battle. At the time, the announcement on the Snapjoy blog rang with excitement, and even though they weren't going to be accepting new signups, they promised that "your photos are safe!"
Well, not anymore. As of yesterday, Dropbox has officially decided to shut down the service -- a decision that was confirmed by Snapjoy on its blog and through an email to all of its remaining subscribers.
It looks like the ongoing revamp of Flickr isn't limited to additional storage space and a new user interface. Yahoo, the company behind Flickr, has acquired Ghostbird Software for an undisclosed sum in order to beef up Flickr's mobile offerings.
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.
Over the last year, almost every time we've heard the word "acquisition" it's been preceded by the word, or rather company, Shutterfly. That's because Shutterfly has been very busy buying up companies and galleries and, fortunately for users, putting them to work in real ways.
It was less than two weeks ago that the new Shutterfly Mobile app was announced, a result of its Penguin Digital acquisition. And now, in time to steal a little bit of thunder from all of the CES rumors, sources claim that the photo storage and sharing site is acquiring yet another start-up.
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.
In the world of cloud data storage, Dropbox is one of the 800lb gorillas fighting for your files. In recent days, it has been making big moves to become more of a player in photo storage and sharing. After all, everyone needs a safe place to keep their digital images, right?
The company's latest play came today in the form of an acquisition: Dropbox has acquired fellow cloud-storage company Snapjoy -- a business based around aggregating photos from around the web and from your various devices.
One chapter in the saga of Kodak's escape from bankruptcy has come to an end. The company announced today that it has completed the sale of its valuable imaging patents for $525 million to a group of Silicon Valley companies. The deal involves more than 1,100 patents related to the capturing, manipulating, and sharing of digital photographs.
500px is on a tear. The service has been growing like a weed as of late, and appears to have some ambitious plans in the works. The company announced today that it has acqui-hired (i.e. buying out a small company mainly for the team's talent) the two-man development team Pulpfingers, creators of the popular iOS 500px browsing app ISO500.
All good things come to an end. Bad ones do too. After denying rumors last month that it would soon be shutting down, the over-funded photo-sharing app Color has now announced that it will indeed be shuttering its service.
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.