They made a GIF! You guys love GIFs, right?!

The official announcement just hit the newswires. Yahoo has acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, "substantially all of which is payable in cash." Because really, who wants to bet on the stability of Yahoo's stock price?

In the press release, CEO Marissa Mayer tries desperately to explain the acquisition in any way she can besides admitting Yahoo wants to drink the blood of the young: "Yahoo is the Internet's original media network. Tumblr is the Internet's fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands - established and emerging."

Mr. Karp also chimed in on, as always, the staff blog:

"The work ahead of us remains the same – and we still have a long way to go! – but with more resources to draw from."

He added, "Plus both our logos end with punctuation!"  He also signed the post, "Fuck yeah."

The new stepmom is also already trying to placate wailing, hysterical Tumblr users. From a note just posted to Yahoo's official Tumblr:

We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Let's go live to the Tumblr dashboard to get the reaction:

There's always Medium, maybe?

As a for-instance. (Photo: screencap)

We suppose there's worse ways to end a blue winter Monday than by watching another startup cash out. Business Insider is reporting that Twitter has acquired social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs. While headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (nestled in the warm bosom of its mother institution, MIT), CEO J.P. Maheu is based here in the New York City.

So far there's no number, but Business Insider says it's Twitter's largest acquisition to date, north of the $40 million it paid for Tweetdeck, suggesting a price tag somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Cha-ching! 

It's pretty much a no-duh move for Twitter, the service where people rush to crack copycat Bane jokes as soon as the Superdome's lights go out. If Twitter's going to turn all that potential into filthy lucre, the company needs to offer would-be advertisers something a little more solid than a sea of 140-character hosannas to Beyonce and plaudits for whoever runs the Oreo account.

Bluefin Labs offers a way of translating "awareness" into numbers; witness this infographic the startup produced for Ad Age, which tracks the top 10 Super Bowl ads according to social media response. Bluefin has also partnered with Neilsen to develop a social TV rating. Add it all up, and it begins to look like a promising way for Twitter to appeal to marketers and media partners that want to see some hard numbers.

We've reached out to Bluefin Labs and Twitter for comment and will update if we hear anything more.

UPDATED: Twitter has now confirmed the acquisition on its blog, explaining the move: "We believe that Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help us create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV."

Super Bowl jokes, anyone?

Founder Kevin Systrom documents Stumptown Roasters, because of course (Photo: Instagram)

Five months after Facebook announced that it would be acquiring Instagram for $1 billion in cash (yay!) and stock (hrmm), the social network is rolling out the welcome mat. The deal was held up by a Federal Trade Commission investigation into potential anticompetitive practices. The FTC approved the acquisition a couple weeks ago, concluding that the popularity of Instagram competitors (like Hipstamatic and Camera Awesome) compared to Facebook Camera meant that competition was thriving.

In its report, the Office of Fair Trading included the fact that Instagram didn't have any revenue to speak of and didn't have data on its users--misreading the situation entirely. As The Next Web noted: "That discounts, of course, the enormous contextual value of the location data recorded with each image, not to mention the facial recognition database that Facebook has been working on making second-to-none."

In a post about the deal closing, Instagram revealed that its app has now been used to share more than 5 billion photos, a staggering jump from the 31 million and counting photos on the app before the acquisition was announced.   The number of users on Instagram is likewise rapidly trending upwards. It surpassed 80 million users in July, and is growing by more than 10 million users per month. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's VP of engineering, emphasizedthe app's independence and community, pointing to developments in mobile:

As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.

Meanwhile Instagram, assured users that they had no big changes to fear, after noting a survey of what you can find on the app: "weddings to epic pilgrimages through the Spanish countryside." (Wait a second, is Gwyneth on Insta??)

 The Instagram app and its features will stay the same one you know and love, and we’ll keep working together to build a better Instagram for everyone.

The big question in our mind is still whether or not Instagram will be ported to the web. For regular users, it's a mixed bag--trading in the sense of intimacy and privacy (whether or not your account is private) for better stalking capabilities. Until then, there's our new friend: Westagram. Sorry, pal, but we fear you are not long for this world.

Cyborg Vision, a hack built with Face.com's API.

After rumors all but confirmed it, Face.com, the Israeli facial recognition startup, finally acknowledged on its blog today that the company has been acquired by Facebook. TechCrunch's sources estimate that the acquisition price was between $80 million and $100 million, the same figure circulated that month in the Israeli press. The deal was reportedly not part of an acqui-hire to bring Face.com's staff into the fold, but rather centered around leveraging the company's technology to help Facebook with mobile photos.

In fact, for the first deployment of its technology, Face.com released an app called KLIK that let users tag Facebook friends in real-time by scanning public photos in your social network and suggesting tags for friends. Once Face.com's technology is embedded in Facebook, users would theoretically be able get suggestions and tag friends with one click. The benefits to Facebook come in the form of increased engagement from all those "You've been tagged" notifications. As Facebook's SEC filings noted, revenues could suffer if users decreasing their engagement with mobile, the social network's Kryptonite. There's also the option of baking Face.com's technology into Instagram, Facebook's other recent mobile-minded acquisition.

As Betabeat has noted before, Face.com's API is incredibly popular in hackathons. Probably because developers can use it to build apps like Cyborg Vision, which lets see the world around you like a Terminator.

In the announcement, CEO and founder Gil Hirsch assured third-party developers that that kind of support would continue:

Now, lots of developers use Face.com technology to power various apps and make wonderful products.  We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.  If there are new developments you can expect to hear from us here, on the developer blog, and through our developer newsletter.

No CTO? No problem! Suddenly, Zuck's mobile future isn't looking so bleak.

Zuckd!

This morning, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg joined high-end photo-sharing site The Fancy under the name "zuckd." I guess you could say: fancy recognize fancy? In that time, the Facebook CEO has already amassed more than 102,000 followers. He's also following some fellow Facebookers, such as Dave Morin, the CEO of Path, and Serkan Piantino, who will head up Facebook's engineering office in New York. (Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes sits on company's board.)

A few months back, we described the aspirational site as "kind of like Pinterest, but all about the money." The Fancy is growing fast and has a plan to turn anything users share into a chance to buy.

Zuck has also registered for Twitter and Google+ and Pinterest itself, but naturally, his presence on a young site is bound to jump-start the rumor mill.

"You just can never tell if he's interested in buying a shelving system, or the entire company," says Fast Company, noting that the last time Zuck expressed interest in a Jack Dorsey startup, he ended up buying it. In fact, not longer after he threw down a billion for Instagram, the tech press speculated that the acquisition was motivated in part by Pinterest's growing cache.

Whether or not today's move is a sign of acquisitions to come, we look forward to seeing what the world's 9th most powerful person has on his wish list. We definitely would have guessed small island nation over library shelves, but hey.

First Prize?

When the news broke this Monday that Twitter was acquiring Posterous, the reaction among the tech blogs was a rather muffled meh. Posterous, the microblogging platform that was pitted again Tumblr as soon as it game out of the gate, simply never got much traction. The platform's founder, Garry Tan moved on to a more promising role as designer-in-residence and now venture partner at Y Combinator.

But what if Twitter had purchased Tumblr instead?

According to Gawker's Ryan Tate, that's exactly what Twitter was hoping for. His characterization of a partnership between two companies that hemorrhage cash? "The millenium's worst merger," beating out Time Warner-AOL's "worst deal of the century." As Mr. Tate writes:

It's hard to imagine a pairing of two more overvalued and under-earning companies than Twitter and Tumblr, certainly not in the last 11 years. Aside from losing lots of money, both companies are bumbling about looking for a business strategy, more than five and four years from their founding, respectively. Nor would a combination harmonize the chaos, given the leadership differences; one company is run by a 25-year-old bon vivant car enthusiast on the east coast, the other by a former management consultant who convenes leadership classes and orders up lists of company "core values" out on the west coast.

Nonetheless, Twitter's aim, said Mr. Tate, was to "add another channel into which Twitter could sell ads."

As NBC reports, selling ads (something Tumblr won't deign to do) is partly what Twitter wants to do with Posterous (well that and be all things to all people):

Why just be a part of the Internet, when you can try to mostly be it? Why be this machine for referring to Tumblr links, when Twitter users can start sending more traffic to Posterous links?

There's also the matter of advertising. It's no secret that Twitter is hard to monetize. Instead of crowding up the Twitter feed with ads, the company could offload advertisements to Posterous (or whatever new platform it becomes when Twitter's wrapped its fingers around it).

Word of a Twitter-Tumblr partnership have been floating since January; Tumblr president John Maloney called it a "false rumor." However, Mr. Tate's sources seem to support what was out there: that Twitter was planning on offering equity to Tumblr, since the latest injection of cash valued Tumblr at $800 million despite "scant" and "mostly experimental" revenues, as the Wall Street Journal reported last August.

Instead, Twitter got Posterous, which raised 8 percent as much funding as Tumblr, but doesn't offer (as-yet-unmonetized!) pageview riches.

Sorry, Chad, we're now using your photo for all TaskRabbit news.

Once upon a time in a real-time peer-to-peer marketplace, an auction-based website for local skills met an auction-based platform for local tasks, fell in love and got acquired! At least that's how TaskRabbit and SkillSlate might tell it to their grandkids. That is if this outsourcing your dirty work business catches on.

This morning, TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based company that helps users find nearby "Rabbits" to do unwanted tasks officially announced that it had acquired SkillSlate, a New York-based company that helps users find people with skills they need, such as fire breathing and personal chefery. Combined they hope to form a national "service network."

Neither startup is currently disclosing the acquisition price. But reached by email earlier this morning, SkillSlate co-founder and CEO Bartek Ringwelski told us: "Let's just say the last few months have been busy.  I think I may even have hinted about consolidation in the market when we talked a couple months ago :-)"

Betabeat spoke to a source who said that SkillSlate had also reached out to "a few other companies looking to feel this path out." The source, who wished to remain anonymous, said it was likely for a smaller price and possibly more of an acqui-hire: "it was as much about picking up some talent as anything else."

According to TaskRabbit, Mr. Ringwelski will join the company as director of financial planning and analysis and SkillSlate's Brian Rothenberg, co-founder and VP of product & marketing, will come on board as director of online marketing. Mike Nelson, SkillSlate's CTO, is the newest member of TaskRabbit’s engineering team.

Betabeat wishes we could take credit for this blessed union, considering that we included both startups in a feature about the rise of the convenience economy. But it's a natural fit, especially considering both startups crowdsource service providers and like to position themselves as micro-job creation engines for America's underemployed. Besides, TaskRabbit, which picked up $17.8 million in funding last month, had money to spend and momentum to fuel to keep up with it's largest competitor, Zaarly, which also picked up $14.1 million in October after launching in February and now wants to help promote small businesses within the auction format.

In a blog post this morning, TaskRabbit wrote:

"By integrating SkillSlate’s platform with TaskRabbit’s, we will be able to provide an even more enhanced service – one where folks can get help with practically anything."

In an email to SkillSlate users, the startup explained that the integration would happen over the coming months.

Will I still be able to access my business profile and account? Yes, you will be able to access your business profile on SkillSlate, as well as use our other features, such as our post-to-Craigslist tool.

Jared and Steve, two awesome, SMS, totally same-size bros.

GroupMe just celebrated its one year anniversary, and founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht certainly had something to smile about. A deal in the works for months was just completed, with global VOIP giant Skype acquiring GroupMe for an undisclosed price north of $50 million.

The two co-founders have scored positions at Microsoft but will run the company from New York. And while GroupMe will remain independent, it is likely to become core to Skype's efforts in mobile, SMS and social. Skype's over 560 million global users will certainly do a lot to boost GroupMe's profile and user network if the two companies are deeply integrated.

Betabeat doesn't have an exact figure, but two sources close to the deal confirmed it was more than $50 million and less than $100 million, which would make it a pretty sweet exit for a start-up that built version one at a 24-hour hackathon, has raised $11.5 million to date, and still has a lot of cash left in the back from their series B. We heard $75 million from one source and All Things D is reporting $85 million. Mike Arrington reports its $43 million right now, going as high as $68 million if the company achieves its earn outs over the next few years.

At any rate, it's the first big exit for several investors including Thrive Capital, Lerer Ventures and angel investor David Tisch; and you might say the first big start-up exit for New York in the current wave of lightweight, social media/web 2.0 companies.

"... Not just a big win for GroupMe and our amazing investors, but also for New York City. As part of the deal, GroupMe will remain in New York, team intact, working on our standalone application. The major difference will be that we will now have access to Skype’s 175 million monthly connected users. 175 million people. That’s a very big deal," GroupMe writes on its blog.

Net worth-nitpicking aside, this is a huge win for a company that many questioned. Being born at TechCrunch Disrupt and having a ton of hype before any revenue led to a lot of carping. Group texting is a crowded space and a feature that isn't very difficult to build into the core of Android or iOS. But GroupMe's product was strong, their iterations were fast and their savvy clearly extended to the mobile space as a whole. Skype arguably picked the best of breed to help it conquer the mobile market when it decided to buy the start-up, which had originally approached them about potential commercial partnerships.

GroupMe's 20 employees are all staying at the start-up, GroupMe says. Mr. Martocci and Mr. Hecht will get Microsoft titles, which were described by one source as "big jobs", although the specific words in those titles are yet to be decided.

It's not been announced whether developer Pat Nakajima, the third employee at GroupMe, will retain his business card title "Boy Wonder"; however it has been speculated that his compensation was denominated in signed Taylor Swift CDs.

The GroupMe team celebrated the acquisition Sunday at its Flatiron office with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.

Disclosure.