Wednesday, May 25, 2011

UberMedia Loses TweetDeck To Twitter

After months of back and forth rumors about who, exactly, was acquiring Twitter client softwar firm TweetDeck, Twitter officially announced this morning that it has acquired TweetDeck. The rumors came despite early--and incorrect--reports that TweetDeck had been acquired by Pasadena-based UberMedia, the Twitter client software firm headed by Idealab's Bill Gross. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, however, reports place the acquisition around $50M. UberMedia had been battling Twitter over its rapid expansion into the Twitter client application software area, with Twitter at one point completely shutting off API access to UberMedia's client apps. It looks like UberMedia's courting of TweetDeck did benefit one party, however, which is TweetDeck itself, which had reported been ready to sell to UberMedia for $30M, before Twitter stepped in and closed the deal at a much higher price.

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