The timing on this is so funny to me, since a good friend of mine just moved out to San Francisco last week to join Wildfire. "Surprise! You actually joined Google!" :-) Congratulations to everyone!
The exits of Buddy Media and Wildfire are related to Facebook introducing Timeline to Pages.
If you assume they were notified of the change in early 2012, and the change happened in March/April, and a deal of this size taking a few months to close, you can see how this deal (and the Buddy Media one) are likely directly related. The change also coincides with WF and BM both announcing ad-related pivots the day before Facebook announced their Timeline change (source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wildfire-announces-new-capa... and http://www.marketwatch.com/story/buddy-media-announces-brigh...).
The Pages change destroyed many companies. The week that the change was forced, I took a screen shot of the top app losers on socialbakers. Check it out yourself: http://i.imgur.com/C3zSQ.png . BandPage, for example, lost 90% of its traffic in 60 days. Wildfire apps saw their user base gutted as well. I remember looking up the stats for a few of their apps a month later and saw their app install base had fallen huge double digit percentages. It's hard to see exactly how companies like WF were impacted, but I think the Timeline change gutted their unstoppable growth and forced them to exit while things were still looking bright.
And this, in my opinion, helps explain why they took a relatively small exit of $250M (given the larger $689M of BM).
The deal was a little more complicated. I believe Efficient Frontier bought Context Optional for $50 million, and then Adobe acquired eFrontier for $400 million. I went ahead and added it.
I've been freelancing full-time with Wildfire since they were around 40 people and had just closed their Series A. They've got a fantastic product (I still like it after working with it day in and day out), and a seriously rocking team. They deserve all the good stuff that this will bring.
Social media marketing for medium-sized to enterprise businesses. Ex. Software subscription that a company like Pepsi would use to manage the social properties/promotions for all their beverages.
I'm in Israel on Birthright and I just found out that I'm now a Google employee. Not gonna lie... This feels pretty awkward, but I also feel very proud to be a part of the Wildfire team on this exciting day for Alain and Victoria.
She has 10,500 subscribers. I'm sort of fascinated by that- I wonder how much she is worth to Wildfire just by virtue of who she is?
I loved WildFire in the past, deployed a couple of servers (even before they changed the name to wildfire), but I refuse to read a crappy, broken, useless blog post. So no details for me - and a reminder to ignore links to a blogging platform that shows a couple of tools (screwdriver etc?) before it gives you misformatted content.
It seems there are some random elements that are set to fixed position, when they really shouldn't be. I imagine it will be fixed very shortly -- it would be odd if nobody at Google has noticed it yet.
It's also all kind of broken for me in a 1024x768 window. Scrolling the article scrolls it over top of the title but under the bar below the title. meh.
Not necessarily. They're not Facebook-only, and it's entirely possible Google may have Wildfire focus more on upcoming Google+ API stuff in the future.
I visited over there in April - it was a very cool workplace full of interesting and motivated people. Though they weren't that happy when I was playing around with their app and found a bug related to daylight savings on a Friday afternoon, haha. I'm really happy for them.
When you comment, would you please add something constructive to the discussion that others may find useful? Your quick statement doesn't give any reasoning as to why it caught you off guard, what you expected instead, how you believe this may affect future acquisitions, etc. If you have that knowledge, please share (or hold these little surprises to yourself). Thank you!
What I find frightening is that this company was acquired for $250 mil and I've never remember hearing about it. I really don't see those valuations to be justified.
The timing on this is so funny to me, since a good friend of mine just moved out to San Francisco last week to join Wildfire. "Surprise! You actually joined Google!" :-) Congratulations to everyone!