Yahoo! Acquires IntoNow, “The Shazam of TV,” For Between $20-$30 Million
Amit Chowdhry | Monday April 25, 2011 | 994 views| 1 Comment
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has acquired IntoNow for between $20-$30 million. IntoNow is like the “Shazam of TV.” IntoNow’s SoundPrint platform allows mobile app users to listen to a TV show and it will find a match within 4-12 seconds of listening to the audio. IntoNow will notify the user about the individual episode being watched.
IntoNow has about 266 years of video indexed in their database and over 2.61 million individual airings. IntoNow launched only 12 weeks ago. Apparently Shazam, Facebook, and Twitter all had an interest in acquiring IntoNow.
Yahoo! SVPs Bill Shaughnessy and Blake Irving are rumored to be the two executives that pushed Yahoo! into making a deal happen with IntoNow. IntoNow has roughly between 500,000 and 1 million users.
Yahoo! plans on integrating their own products into IntoNow. IntoNow will also have the benefit of Yahoo!’s resources to expand their product for the iPad and Android platforms. IntoNow’s seven employees will be joining Yahoo! full time.
IntoNow was spun out of another funded company called Auditude. Auditude was a video monetization company that raised a second round of funding this past January. Adam Cahan, the current CEO of IntoNow, was CEO of Auditude at the time. Instead of raising another round of funding, IntoNow used capital from Auditude in exchange for ownership share. Adam Cahan will become a VP of product at Yahoo!
Popular
