Facebook has become known for making a good number of talent-focused startup acquisitions, aka acqui-hires — but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those “non-material” sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million.

Here’s the wording from the document:

“During the six months ended June 30, 2012, we completed business acquisitions for total consideration of $24 million. These acquisitions were not material to our condensed consolidated financial statements individually or in the aggregate.”

From January through the end of June, Facebook made six acquisitions, two of which — Instagram and Face.com — were of material size. That leaves Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox, and Karma as the buys on which Facebook spent $24 million total.

It bears mention that this does not mean that there was a $24 million cap on what the founders of these startups received as part of their decision to join Facebook. Salaries, bonuses, individual stock grants to employees, and the like are not included in this figure.

Facebook also issued new shares of its stock pursuant to some acquisitions, the filing said — 40,000 shares of Class A stock were issued on the day of the Tagtile buy, 36,828 Class A shares were issued the day of the Glancee buy, and 1,099,986 shares were issued the day of the Karma buy.

Here’s the breakdown of where that money went (click to enlarge):

And the bit about the stock issued (click to enlarge):

And the bit about the stock

The patent and IP pricetag

Facebook also broke out the exact amount of money it spent on acquiring patents and IP, that it was pretty significant: $633 million. The bulk of that — $550 million — went to its purchase of hundreds of AOL patents from Microsoft. Facebook spent $83 million total buying 750 patents from IBM . The remainder was spread across other deals. The company detailed the spending in the document like this:

“During the six months ended June 30, 2012, we acquired $633 million of patents and other intellectual property rights. We completed the largest of these acquisitions in June 2012 under an agreement with Microsoft Corporation pursuant to which we were assigned Microsoft’s rights to acquire approximately 615 U.S. patents and patent applications and their foreign counterparts, consisting of approximately 170 foreign patents and patent applications, that were subject to an agreement between AOL Inc. and Microsoft entered into on April 5, 2012. We paid $550 million in cash in exchange for these patents and patent applications.”

Josh Constine contributed reporting to this article.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook hasn’t shared its plans for Glancee, the location-based app it acquired on Friday, but the app fits well into the social network’s location strategy that now goes well beyond check-ins.

“We’re looking at location from a past, present, future sort of tense,” Facebook product manager Josh Williams said at the Where Conference in April. By that, he means letting users share where they have been, where they are now and where they plan to be.

The present tense is pretty clear: users can tag their location in posts to let friends know where they are. As for the past, Timeline allows users to backdate their posts or add old photos to their map. This means Facebook is beginning to gather information on where users have been, including in years before location-based services were available. And with the recent updates to events, users can tag location to indicate where they will be. There are also Open Graph applications that let users list their future travel plans or places they want to go.

The basis for the Glancee, which has since been removed from the Apple App Store, was that users could continuously share their location as the app ran in the background. Users could then browse to see who nearby shared their interests and they would receive push notifications about close matches. This makes present-tense location sharing even easier, but Facebook will likely also consider how this technology could be used for past- and future-tense sharing as well. The social network won’t reveal whether it plans to release a rebranded Glancee app as it did with Beluga’s group messaging app, or simply incorporate Glancee’s co-founders with the rest of its location team, as it did with check-in service Gowalla. But here are some ways we can envision Glancee being applied.

Where friends are

Although Glancee sought to help users meet new people, this feature doesn’t necessarily have wide enough appeal for Facebook’s 900 million users at this time. Many users are sensitive about sharing information with people they don’t know. We imagine social network focusing first on helping users know where their friends are.

Currently, the Facebook mobile site and apps include a check-in feed that shows where users have checked in, but it is not very useful because it does not indicate whether a friend is still at a location. Glancee’s technology could help solve that, and enable more spontaneous meetups among friends. It could also lay the groundwork for a location-based mobile ad network. If users agree to continuously share their location so friends can find them, they might additionally opt-in to get information about deals or sales nearby.

Where friends were

By aggregating data on where friends have been in the past, Glancee could also be used to help users discover new places or decide where to go. Facebook already shows users how many of their friends have been to a location based on check-ins or location tags, but the data is limited only to what users actively shared. The listing would be more complete if users enabled ambient location-sharing, and then a person could reach out to friends for more information about a restaurant that they had been to, for example.

Where friends will be

On the future-location side, users might use events or some other feature to indicate where they plan to be, and Glancee technology could help track their progress along the way. This might be a useful integration for Messenger, Facebook’s standalone group messaging app that already allows users to share their location when they send a message, but doesn’t track it in real-time like iOS apps Find My Friends and Glympse. These apps help users coordinate plans, something Facebook has shown particular interest in recently.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today closed a deal to acquire Glancee, an ambient mobile location app that alerts users when people with similar interests are nearby, according to an announcement on Glancee’s website.

Co-founders of the San Francisco-based startup — Andrea Vaccari, Alberto Tretti and Gabriel Grise — will join Facebook, but other terms of the deal were not disclosed. Glancee has already been removed from the Apple App Store.

This is the social network’s third mobile acquisition since filing for an initial public offering. The company bought mobile photo sharing app Instagram and mobile loyalty startup Tagtile within a single week in April. These, along with the six mobile acquisitions made last year, signal that Facebook wants to bring top mobile talent and technology to its company.

Glancee’s iPhone app let users sign in with Facebook, and then it would show users other people who have things in common with them within a certain radius. The app had 20,000 monthly active and 3,000 daily active Facebook-connected users, according to our AppData tracking service. Its competitor, Highlight, has 80,000 MAU and 9,000 DAU.

Unlike Instagram, which is continuing as a standalone application under its own name, Glancee could evolve into a Facebook-branded app or become part of the mobile Messenger app, which already shares a person’s location. Messenger, as it happens, is the result of Facebook’s acquisition of group messaging app Beluga last year.

Facebook’s main iOS and Android app will send users a push notification when one of their friends checks into a place nearby, but this does not seem to happen when a user simply tags a location in a photo or status, so most users rarely get these alerts or even know the feature exists.

A little under one month after its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has acquired Highlight competitor and ambient location app Glancee.

The social network has already shut down the developer’s passive location app and all three co-founders, Glancee’s only full-time employees, will join Facebook, which now owns its technology. Eric Eldon described Glancee as, “A nice-guy ambient social location app for normal people”, so it’s ideas and founders should fit in well building for Facebook’s mainstream user base.

Facebook said in a statement “We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee. The acquisition closed today. We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends.”

From the Glancee homepage:

We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery.

We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We’ve had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community.

Like competitor app Highlight, Glancee went beyond the checkin and attempted to help users discover other users around them with similar interests.

The instant armchair analysis is that the company couldn’t buy Highlight so they got the next best thing in the ambient location space to compete early. According to AppData, Highlight is probably 3 times larger with 9K daily active users and 80K monthly active users versus Glancee’s 3K daily active users. Moral of the story: Don’t let an Instagram grow under your nose again.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch