Yet Another Social-Network Acquisition was in the news today as Global Defense Strategic Logistics (and doesn’t that sound a little bit like a paramilitary organization out of Command & Conquer?) announced its purchase of Redhedd.com, an online community for people with red hair.

… Yes, I’m serious. An online community for people with red-hair has been bought by a weapons manufacturer who makes red-tipped missiles. Red-hair, red-tipped missiles … get it? Well, apparently somebody at GDSL did, as they supposedly made Redhedd.com founder Steve Warrington "an offer he couldn’t refuse." (Possibly along the lines of "if you don’t sign everything you’ve got over to us, we’ll ram one of these warheads up your red-cheeked buttocks." But that’s baseless conjecture.)

But yeah. This has got to be one of the oddest acquisitions I’ve ever heard of. The main reasoning behind the purchase was GDSL’s desire to "put a friendlier face on their AT-600 series of ballistic missiles." One of their first steps post-acquisition, according to the press release, will include creating a user-profile for GDSL as well as for the long- and short-range missiles in the AT-600 line.

Hmm, maybe I’m just not thinking this through, but it’s hard to imagine an unfriendlier profile than a red-tipped ballistic missile. Just think about what its avatar and photo galleries would look like. And who the hell would add a missile to their friends list? (Ok, actually, it might be kinda cool to have The Death-Bringer writing you a testimonial …)

So none of this really made much sense to me until I started thinking about what GDSL was trying to accomplish, i.e., drum up awareness about their gear. Let’s say they bought Redhedd.com for US$10m … admittedly a bit on the high-side for something this small, but they’ve got deep, missile-shaped pockets so it’s possible. The cost of a handful of ballistic missiles would totally make that money back for them (when India built 20 long-range ballistic missiles in 2001, it cost their government US$150m; the math doesn’t get much clearer than that). So even if they only closed 1 deal as an (indirect) result of this social-network acquisition, it’s still money well-spent methinks.

And of course, there’s the Google effect, which undoubtedly will help their marketing efforts even more. People tend to write about odd business strategies, and I’m sure the amount of noise these guys are making within the blogosphere certainly doesn’t hurt either.

A tasty rumor, if I ever saw one:

… little birdies have informed me that Yahoo has an offer on the table to buy Digg for somewhere in the range of $35 million dollars.

Being acquired by one of the big 3 is pretty much every web entrepreneur’s dream. Not only does it make you obscenely wealthy, but it validates your website’s mission as well (which may not seem quite as important, but I imagine it must feel great to be able to say "I told you this was a good idea" to all the naysayers).

Reading about this rumor reminded me of an interesting piece over at Signal Vs Noise about the dangers of building a company with an acquisition as its end goal:

If you’re about to build anything, don’t build it to flip or you’re almost guaranteed to flop. Sure, you could win the Yahoo lottery, but the odds aren’t in your favor. If 9 out of every 10 new companies fail, I can’t imagine the minute percentage of successful acquisitions. 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? Worse?

Although I totally agree with their philosophy of building a company with growth in mind, I do believe that the chances of a business’ success is a far more complex discussion than a mere statistical lottery. Like I said above, getting acquired by a multinational company is validation, in more ways than one. It means that your business had a solid idea, a great implementation and the potential to grow even further with the proper resources. Either that or they bought you out in an effort to kill the competition, but that in itself just confirms that you were on to something big.

So it’s not so much a "random act of fate" as it is "survival of the fittest," because it’s the people that have the great ideas and work the hardest to bring it to fruition that are ultimately rewarded for their efforts.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on the fact that Disney has little choice left but to try to acquire Pixar outright, if they want to stay in the business of making animated features. The two companies were in a partnership for nearly a decade until Pixar decided to strike out on its own, leaving Disney to fend for itself in the relatively new 3D-animation arena. Disney has released exactly one CG feature since then, Chicken Little, which sustained some fairly bad reviews during its theatrial run late last year.

So it turns out that the LA Times prediction of an impending takeover was right after all, although they did overshoot their valuation by about US$3bn:

The board of Pixar Animation Studios, the digital animations company, is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company’s $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney.

The all-share deal will make Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, around $3.5bn and the single largest shareholder in Disney. Jobs created Pixar in 1986 when he paid $10m for the computer animations division of Lucasfilm, owned by Stars Wars creator George Lucas.

Read the rest of the news item here.

This is officially the first acquisition I’ve written about that actually had anything to do with physical items:

FUJI Photo Film Co will buy an Avecia Group unit for 150 million pounds (US$260 million) to become the world’s biggest supplier of dye and inks used in inkjet printers.

Tokyo-based Fuji Photo is expanding on expectations that demand for inkjet printing will rise as more consumers print digital photos at home.

Avecia supplies ink to Hewlett-Packard Co and Canon Inc. The chemicals maker said it had sales of 36.1 million pounds last year.

Of course, the whole digital photo craze is a direct result of two phenomena, i.e., affordable digital photography, and social photo-sharing. Since I’m against printing in general (with inks or otherwise), I believe this to be more of a transitionary step for Fuji Photo, than an evolutionary one. The true evolution –probably at least a decade away– would likely involve one of these babies instead, which will put an entire industry into the ground when it reaches maturity.

SEO by the Sea has a really interesting post detailing all of Google’s acquisitions since 2001. Unfortunately, no amounts were given, but the author did go to the trouble of listing the relevant patents and abstracts where available. Here’s the list in a nutshell:

Android (August 2005), software for mobile telephones
Akwan Information Technologies (July 2005), an R&D center in Brazil
Dodgeball (May 2005), social-networking software for mobile devices
Urchin Software (March 2005), Web Analytics software (became Google Analytics in Q3 of this year; this is coincidentally the app I use on our webserver, and is easily the best in its class)
Zipdash (December 2004) Provides navigation assistance for road traffic on mobile in real time by GPS.
Where 2 Technologies (October 2004), Internet mapping
Keyhole (October 2004), imagery by satellite
Picasa (July 2004), software of management of photographs on line
Ignite Logic (May 2004), design of turn key legal sites
Genius Labs (October 2003), Biz Stone was Genius Labs
Sprinks (October 2003), paid advertising
Kaltix (September 2003), Research on personalized search, from Taher Haveliwala, Glen Jeh, and Sepandar Kamvar
Applied Semantics (April 2003), contextual advertising
Neotonic Software (April 2003), email customer support
Pyra Labs (February 2003), editor of Blogger, blogging platform
Outride (September 2001), a Xerox PARC spinoff, data-mining and semantic analysis
Deja.com (February 2001), Purchase of their usenet archive and other assets, which become Google Groups

With Maxtor being under financial pressure over the past couple of years due to a string of quarterly losses and manufacturing problems which resulted in having to shut down production for a short interval earlier this year, it was only a matter of time before it was snapped up by one of its competitors. It happened today, as hard drive manufacturer Seagate has agreed to purchase its rival Maxtor for US$1.9 billion.

How long Western Digital will be able to hold out against the combined forces of Seagate and Maxtor? As of the second quarter of 2005, Western Digital was in the #2 position with 17.6 percent of the global market for hard drives. Seagate was #1 with 30.5 percent with Maxtor coming in fourth place with 13.5 percent. With the new, larger Seagate poised to control nearly half of the global drive market, how long will it be before some of the other, smaller players join forces?

I came across this one pretty late, I know. Read the full article at ArsTechnica.

Just rumors at this point:

Google is going to acquire Opera. That’s right, the wonderful and powerful Opera browser from Norway (Opera Software ASA to be precise) might become Google’s latest acquisition.

In addition to offering a traditional web browser, Opera also plays very hard in the mobile browser space. Might the acquisition be Google’s holiday present to itself?

Could the much-anticipated GBrowser in fact simply be a rebranded Opera? I seriously doubt it. That is, if Google really were set to acquire Opera, they would probably need to invest a ton of money into filling in some of its gaping holes.

The "gaping hole" that is foremost in my mind is that Opera doesn’t work with the HTML editor in Google’s Blogger.com, because it’s never supported the "Editable HTML" functionality that Microsoft proferred with IE5. (The "Editable HTML" functionality I’m talking about allows textareas to function like a mini word-processing software, complete with buttons for Bold, Italics, Underline, font sizes and colors, and practically any other formatting option the programmer can bring to life. Firefox chose to support it, simply because it’s super-cool.) Methinks that Opera’s refusal to adhere to any thing that is non-standard, regardless of how useful that thing is, will eventually end up biting them in the ass. If it hasn’t already, that is.

That said, there are some very compelling reasons for Google to want to acquire Opera as well. For one thing, it’s a major player in the mobile browsing space, home media and vertical application markets. And it’s the only browser I know of that supports voice commands and "mouse gestures" (a really elegant set of UI enhancements that let you flick your mouse left and right to go back and forward, respectively, plus tons of other common browser commands).

Time will tell, I suppose.

The entertainment industry was startled Friday when Paramount Pictures swooped in and struck a deal to buy DreamWorks SKG, the independent movie studio that rival NBC Universal had spent six months pursuing, according to sources close to the matter.

As recently as October, Paramount had publicly denied any interest in the acquisition after its parent company, Viacom Inc., balked at the high asking price of $1.5 billion including assumption of debt. But Viacom’s board approved just such a bid Thursday, provided that outside investors help finance the deal.

I actually learned a couple of things about Dreamworks SKG while reading this (pretty lengthy) LA Times piece, the most surprising of which is that the studio actually hasn’t been doing that well.

When it was launched in 1994 by Messrs. Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, the company was envisioned to be a multi-facted media empire, producing everything from movies to tv to video games to music. To date, only the motion-picture arm of Dreamworks is still actively churning out content (although it did receive a well-timed shot-in-the-arm with the success of Dreamworks Animation hits like Shrek, Shrek 2 and Wallace & Gromit over the past 3 years). Even so, Dreamworks has about $500 million in debt, the total amount of which will be included in the $1.5 billion deal.

Yahoo recently confirmed its acquisition of the uber-popular del.icio.us, adding social-tagging to their growing line of next-generation products, i.e., Flickr (photo-sharing), Upcoming (events-sharing), Dialpad (VoIP), Konfabulator (desktop widgets), Oddpost (email), Blo.gs (blog aggregation), WhereOnEarth (mapping), MusicMatch (media player), Wulf Networks (data synchronization), Stata Labs (email search) … and that’s just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head. (They also purchased Overture and Inktomi several years back to bolster their technology, but that was back when it was all about the search-engine. These days the battle is being fought on a much grander scale, with "integrated services" being the key dynamic.)

We’re definitely in Corporate Buyout season, kids.

AOL has reportedly purchased Weblogs Inc., the parent company of professional blog sites such as Engadget, Autoblog and my favorite "celebrity blog" Blog Maverick, for a cool US$25 million. The Weblogs Inc. group of websites currently serves about 30 million page views per month, which is not huge, but definitely has lots of advertising potential. (If you do some rough Google-Adsense-style mathematics on that number, Weblogs et al should be generating a minimum of 60,000 advertising clicks per month, although obviously it has a much higher earning potential than that.)

Founders  Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey must be very happy indeed.