Good morning! A lot of acquisitions happened yesterday. Here's what's going on in tech:
- Google bought smart hardware and appliance startup Nest for $3.2 billion. "Google will help us fully realize our vision of the conscious home and allow us to change the world faster than we ever could if we continued to go it alone," says Nest CEO Tony Fadell.
- Google was reportedly the only serious bidder in the Nest deal. Nest was close to raising a ~ $150 million round of financing at a $2 billion valuation when Google swooped in.
- Some Fitbit Force owners are complaining of severe skin irritation. "Our customers are our top priority, so we already have been taking steps to make this right with any customers who feel that they have an allergy related to their Fitbit device including offering a refund or a choice of a replacement tracker," Fitbit said in a statement.
- Groupon bought Ideeli for $43 million in cash. The flash sales company had raised $107 million but it lost about $30 million last year. It was once valued at $250 million.
- Facebook bought online discussions startup Branch for $15 million. It was founded by a 22-year-old who had raised $2 million.
- The Lerer family, which has created companies such as The Huffington Post and Thrillist, has launched another media startup with former Salon Editor-in-Chief Kerry Laurman called The Dodo. Co-founded by Izzie Lerer, The Dodo is a site that will house pictures, articles and videos of animals.
- Matt Mullenweg is taking over as CEO of Automattic for Toni Schneider. Automattic is the maker of Wordpress, a company Mullenweg founded. "It's obvious that no one in their twenties should run a company," Mullenweg jokes of the move. "They think they know everything, a fact I can now say with complete confidence now that I'm 30 and two days old."
- Why "booth babes" at technology conferences don't yield a good return on investment.
- Troy Carter, Lady Gaga's former manager, has invested in more than 50 startups including Uber and Dropbox. Here's a profile on him, and how he bounced back after he was dumped by Gaga.
- A British programmer, John Graham-Comming, has started a popular Tumblr account that cracks code shown in Hollywood blockbusters such as The Social Network and Iron Man. A lot of it is copy and pasted from things as basic as an Intel manual.