Something pretty rare happened today in Japan’s web industry: a big Internet company acquired a smaller one. In this case, Yahoo Japan (the nation’s biggest website) snatched up all shares of location-based mobile advertising company Cirius Technologies.
Cirius is headquartered in Tokyo and also operates Cirius Technologies, Inc. in San Francisco (more info on the US side of the business can be found in my earlier TechCrunch article on the company).
The company’s flagship product (in both markets) is called AdLocal, which makes it possible to reach consumers with ads that take into account the physical location of users via GPS, Cell-IDs, map coordinates and other data. And that’s exactly the technology that Yahoo Japan was after – apart from the over 30 brains in the company, obviously.
Following the acquisition, Cirius will close the office in the US and move its HQ to that of Yahoo Japan’s. The price for the acquisition was not disclosed. Cirius CEO Gen Miyazawa, who founded the company in 2004, is just 28 years old.
Via TechCrunch Japan
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