TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer (Photo: Thisistravel.co.uk)

Jetsetter, the luxury travel site that Gilt Groupe put up for sale for around $50 million back in October, has been acquired by TripAdvisor, according to a press release published to PRNewswire. A Gilt Groupe representative confirmed the acquisition to Betabeat. Skift reported back in March that Jetsetter was close to an acquisition, most likely by the travel reviews site.

"In a short span of time, Jetsetter has emerged as a premier player in the travel space, and we are proud of what the team has accomplished," Gilt Groupe CEO Michelle Peluso said in the release. "There are strong synergies between Jetsetter and TripAdvisor and we are confident that having Jetsetter be part of the TripAdvisor group will further accelerate its growth."

A report in the Wall Street Journal in October indicated that Jetsetter was having difficulties finding buyers as it had reportedly set its asking price at $100 million. However, a source close to the situation told Betabeat in October that the listing price was actually $30-50 million.

Jetsetter endured a series of ups and downs prior to Gilt's decision to put it up for sale. Its founder and former CEO Drew Patterson faced staffer mutiny last May before Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan asked him to step down. Mr. Ryan attributed Mr. Patterson's departure to turnover and low staff morale. "More than half of us are looking to leave within the next month, at which point the business won’t be operational,” a Jetsetter employee told Betabeat back in May.

“Too many people have left," Mr. Ryan told Betabeat after Mr. Patterson stepped down. "When you’re the CEO, you’re responsible for that. We’ve had a lot of communication over the last six months on this issue. At a certain point, for myself, you make a change.”

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor is no stranger to acquiring NYC startups. Back in October, it also acquired Brooklyn travel startup Wanderfly.

Update:

A source within the company tells Betabeat that TripAdvisor took the Jetsetter team out tonight to an open bar at Strand and told them "nothing will change." The source also said Jetsetter will be moving out of the Gilt offices "soon," and will keep some sort of relationship with Gilt, though it's unclear what that will be.

Additional reporting contributed by Nitasha Tiku.

(Photo: Zurb)

Forrst, a developer network that came out of the 500startups accelerator, announced today that it has been acquired by ZURB, a 15-year-old community for product designers to help companies do design work. This is the second acquisition for Forrst in less than a year; back in March, it was acquired by design community Colourlovers. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

ZURB says it wants to help nurture Forrst into an active design community that can be a place for designers to share ideas and receive feedback. According to a press release, they plan to:

• We will actively listen, participate, and foster the site to build a strong, active Forrst community.

• With a suite of design apps, a top-20 open-source framework (Foundation) and over 15 years of product design experience, we’re excited to lead the Forrst community forward to achieve great things. We’ll start by streamlining the site interface and implementing responsive design for the mobile web.

• We’ll iterate upon and add new Forrst features to help designers and developers collaborate easily and effectively. The invite system will shift to reward users who make consistent, high-quality contributions to the site.

ZURB is a product design company with a three-pronged approach: services, product tools for designers and educational materials. The acquisition will be an asset-only deal, so no Forrst employees will be making the move to ZURB.

"Our purpose as a business is to help people design for people," ZURB's "Chief Instigator" Bryan Zmijewski told Betabeat. "Forrst is a community of designers and developers who are looking to develop their craft. We see alignment with all the other things we've been doing to really help people focus on sharing design feedback."

Mr. Zmijewski assured Betabeat that the community will still be for developers as much as it is for designers. "From a design perspective, we look at it holistically and try to solve product problems and not just interface issues," he said.

Mr. Zmijewski said that Colourlovers, which acquired Forrst back in March 2012, reached out to them to get the acquisition ball rolling. "Sometimes things aren't great fits," he offered.

This guy used to be a fucking STARFLEET Captain! [Photo: WJYY)

The release reads:

Priceline.com Incorporated (PCLN) announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement for the Priceline Group to acquire KAYAK in a stock and cash transaction.  Under the terms of the agreement, the transaction values KAYAK at $1.8 billion ($1.65 billion net of cash acquired) or $40 per share of KAYAK (subject to the collar described below), with the Group paying approximately $500 million of the consideration in cash and $1.3 billion in equity and assumed stock options.

The Boards of Directors of the Priceline Group and KAYAK have unanimously approved the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including a vote of KAYAK’s shareholders and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close by late 1^st quarter 2013.  KAYAK’s current management team will continue to manage KAYAK’s operations independently as part of the Priceline Group of companies.  The Group expects that the impact of the KAYAK acquisition on Non-GAAP EPS in 2013 will be de minimis.

With both companies trading publicly, the announcement came minutes after the markets closed. Priceline's stock closed at $627.87 today after falling 1.06 percent; Kayak fell 1.59 percent to $31.04.

The travel industry as a whole has seen 37 percent growth this year, though much of that occurred in early 2012. In October, Priceline led the charge on a "travel group rebound," surpassing earnings forecasts.

Despite existing within the same industry, the two companies are strange bedfellows when it comes to their business models. Kayak aggregates travel prices from sites across the web to help users find the cheapest airfare and hotel rooms. Priceline, however, is built on an auction strategy, where users offer a bid for flights, hotels or car rentals and are immediately booked for that service if the business accepts their offer. The press release says Kayak will continue to operate independently of Priceline, but wouldn't that mean Kayak could be driving customers to travel sites that are essentially Priceline competitors?

Meanwhile, some New York techies are already suggesting other travel site alternatives.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. (Photo: Wikipedia)

After rumors began swirling on Twitter about layoffs at Salesforce, the cloud-computing company confirmed to Business Insider that it has laid off a fair chunk of its Radian6 employees. Salesforce says that less than 100 employees were impacted, but considering that Radian6 boasts only 320 employees total (according to Crunchbase), that's still almost a third of the staffers being shown the door.

Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, is an integral part of Salesforce's big play for a piece of the social marketing space. It acquired Radian6 back in March 2011 in order to build out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

In June of this year, Salesforce also acquired New York-based social media marketing company Buddy Media for a reported $689 million. We noted then that an acquisition of Buddy Media made sense following Facebook's bungled IPO. By hiring an "IPO-friendly CFO," Buddy had signaled its desire to go public, but after Facebook's shares dove following its own IPO, that left less room for social marketing companies to successfully follow in its footsteps.

Radian6 and Buddy Media offer complementary products within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Radian6 provides a way for companies to listen to how people are talking about their brands on social platforms, whereas Buddy Media offers a full-scale social marketing dashboard—including publishing and analytics—for brands.

The layoffs at Radian6 also come on the heels of Salesforce filing documents with the SEC regarding its acquisition of Buddy. Though many noted at the time of the acquisition that the purchase price seemed a little high for the social media marketing company, details revealed in the SEC filing show an even grimmer financial situation.

First, the actual acquisition price was even higher than originally reported, at $745 million. The filings also show that Buddy Media lost $20 million in the first six months of 2012, up from $3.5 million in January to June of 2011.

According to Business Insider:

Buddy Media does not appear to be scaling toward profitability. Rather, it's going backwards — losing more money on its revenues as it grows....

In 2011, its losses were 34% of its revenues. In 2012, they're 114% of revenues.

In 2011, Buddy Media spent $12.8 million to make $10.2 million in revenues; in 2012 it spent $35 million to make $18 million.

Given Buddy Media's financials and the layoffs at Radian6, could Salesforce be looking to shutter--or at least phase out--its fledgling social marketing arm?

Competitors like Adobe Social (where this reporter used to work) are ramping up with massive advertising campaigns in an effort to assert their market dominance. Or perhaps the solutions offered by Radian6 and Buddy Media had too much crossover, and Salesforce is attempting to trim the fat while honing the Marketing Cloud.

For its part, Salesforce argues that it's simply "rebalancing its resources," according to a statement sent to Betabeat:

With the combination of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the undisputed leader in social marketing and the only suite that allows brands to unify social listening, engagement, advertising and measurement. With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.

Update:

A Salesforce representative has clarified that the layoffs were not concentrated solely on Radian6, but instead spread throughout the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which could include Buddy Media employees).

Cliche? Yes. Do we care? No. (Photo: flickr.com/terrazzo

Birchbox now has a beachhead in the city of lights. The locally based subscription service--which, last time we checked, claims something like 100,000 members--has acquired a Paris-based lookalike by the name of JolieBox. Anchors away--the ladies of Birchbox are bound abroad.
Said cofounder Katia Beauchamp in the announcement:

"The delight of discovery extends across any border and to any culture.... JolieBox, with their like-minded team and brand ethos, is the absolute perfect partner to build relationships with new customers and brand partners internationally while simultaneously improving distribution as we scale."

What's the French term for "unboxing"? How about, "more eyeshadow samples, please"?

(Photo: Know Your Meme)

Reddit had its biggest day ever thanks to President Obama's AMA. No surprise there, considering the site was inaccessible for most of it. [The Verge]

RIP Microsoft Zune, can't say anyone will really miss you. [Engadget]

Shopbop is trying to make itself into a high-end competitor to sites like Net a Porter. [New York Times]

Facebook has been cleared to officially purchase Instagram. [Wall Street Journal]

Is TechCrunch a bully? [Lane Wood]

Could this be our last chance to use this wonderful image?

Tomorrow (or maybe Monday, unless Betaworks is really cracking that whip) the work of rebuilding Digg will begin. But today is a day of eulogies. What slew Digg, the once-mighty social site at one time thought to be worth $200 million? The Wall Street Journal points to Twitter and Facebook. This Forbes contributor is pretty sure it was Reddit.

Actually, Redditors are pretty sure that Digg killed Digg.

We popped over to the /r/technology subreddit, where Redditors--many of them self-confessed former Digg devotees--were discussing that Forbes article. Between nostalgic ASCII spam and arguments about Ron Paul, users were pretty much unanimous (or as unanimous as Redditors get) regarding what the site had evolved into.

One user said the minute Digg switched to v4, "the front page went from interesting, to a bunch of corporate sponsored ads and a few threads that managed to squeak through," concluding that: "I didn't come to Reddit because it was better or because it replaced digg for me, I came here because digg had a sudden heart attack and died."

Said another user: "Digg killed itself. The interface was bloated up and made sloth-like. The content was dumbed-down with cellulose posts. Top 10 lists grew like weeds. Far too many politics (in posts and behind the scenes). Let's not even mention the Digg bar."

Another poster had a different angle but still pointed the finger right back at the site: "Digg had a great interface. But when they changed their algorithm, it all went to hell."

Others took the long view, though: "What is going to kill Reddit, that is my question?"

As a great man once said, so it goes. Or, if you want to flash back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGytDsqkQY8

Could this be our last chance to use this wonderful image?

Just a couple of months after the Washington Post poached most of its staff, Digg proper--the "core assets," anyway--finally has a fate: It's been purchased by New York's own Betaworks, to be combined with News.me.

As for what to expect: Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Betabeat by email, "We are reverting digg to a startup, expect more things like paperboy," a feature that lets you automatically update whenever you leave your house.

As for the price tag, well, that's a little unclear. Mr. Borthwick refused to comment. However, someone with knowledge of the deal told Betabeat said that ballpark number of $500,000 had been floating around and that was the only figure the source had heard. That's a long way from the $200 million Google is rumored to have once offered for the service, before an acquisition fell through.

Our source speculated that News.me "wanted was more users and traffic," adding that they hadn't necessarily been looking for any deals in particular, but "when it came up it seemed like a potential solution to that problem."

Our source added that the service is "doing very well with their target audience, but I think it wasn't growing enough beyond that to more mainstream users." And while having that core audience is great, "John really wants to see explosive growth for anything we do."

The deal was announced on Digg's blog, in a post by CEO Matt Williams. He explained:

Betaworks is combining Digg with News.me, a Betaworks company with an iPad app, iPhone app and daily email that delivers the best stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Digg will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news.

Mr. Williams added that Mr. Borthwick will become Digg's CEO. For his part, Mr. Williams will be headed to Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

A companion announcement on the Betaworks blog gave a little more insight into what the News.me team will be doing with Digg:

We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

We're avid users of the News.me app and email service, so we're excited to see where this goes.

Name-changer. (Photo courtesy of Fab.com)

Fab took another step toward design-savvy world domination today, with the announcement that the company has acquired the British Isles' own Llustre, which will become Fab UK. The move follows the February purchase of Casacanda and relaunch as Fab.de.

In a statement released this morning, Mr. Goldberg also announced that Maria Molland, previously of Thomson Reuters, will now be Chief European Officer for Fab, a role which is clearly on a growth track.

Shortly after the news broke this morning, CEO Jason Goldberg and CCO Bradford Shellhammer appeared across the pond at Le Web, where they were grilled good-naturedly by Mike Arrington about the announcement. Curious to know more about the team's U.K. plans, we caught the talk via livestream.

Most of all, Mr. Arrington wanted to know why Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Shellhammer decided to buy "a clone" rather than "crushing" Llustre. The Fab.com certainly hadn't responded well to the existence of the Samwer brothers' copycat Bamarang; why give quarter to this company?

For one thing, Fab decided to move fast in Europe, and the U.K. market required a good team. They could either build or acquire one, and "Bradford fell in love with the team here," explained Mr. Goldberg.

But the pair also disputed Arrington's characterization of their new purchase. Mr. Shellhammer argued that Llustre, rather than a mere cheap copy of Fab.com, had its own precise buying aesthetic and "unique point of view." "It's very British, it's very ethereal, it's very pretty," he elaborated, adding that he looks forward to seeing how that point of view might influence the U.S. store.

They also said they're planning to grow Llustre's staff of 25 dramatically. But they wouldn't disclose how much they paid.

Another interesting tidbit from the talk? Fab.com's single bestselling product of all time is a high-end vibrator, and all in all the site has sold "thousands and thousands" of vibrators. Mr. Arrington looked surprised, which suggests to us he has a rather limited view of "luxury."

(mediaserver.com)

We heard rumors that a large majority of Meebo's staff was let go immediately prior to announcing its acquisition by Google, so we reached out to a source to confirm.

A source inside the company told us that Google acquired Meebo primarily for the engineering team, and that those engineers would be going to work on Google+. The source also said that there will be interviews tomorrow to determine the fate of the sales and marketing teams, but that it's not looking good and most people are expecting to be laid off.

Techcrunch confirms our source's account, saying "we’ve confirmed that there are layoffs happening within the sales and marketing arms of the company." They also confirm that the rumored price is indeed around $100 million.

We reached out to Meebo but they directed us to Google's press office, which we also contacted. A Google spokesperson told us that they could not comment on personnel issues. We'll update when we know more.