AOL Acquires Relegence
AOL announced yesterday that it had acquired Relegence Corporation, a news and information aggregation company.
Relegence is one of a number of Israeli-American companies leveraging linguistic and algorithmic technology for search, classification and text mining. While Israel continues to be a strong leader in developing these technologies, the companies (ClearForest, Trendum, Lingomotors and others) have had modest success in translating those technologies to solving real-world problems and in establishing themselves as viable businesses.
Steve Fadem and the Relegence team seem to have broken through in the financial markets, leveraging their technology to aggregate news, feeds, websites and other sources of content. However, it would seem that AOL wants them for the underlying technology, not their institutional Wall Street business.
According to Israeli business newspaper the Globes, the deal was priced between $55-65M, while Ha'aretz put the deal at $50-100M.
It will be interesting to see how AOL integrates the Relegence capabilities into their consumer offerings. Perhaps this may also signify the beginning of mainstream adoption of text mining applications.
For more on the Relegence acquisition, see posts from CNET, BloggingStocks and Staci at PaidContent.
Comments