Microsoft has acquired Genee, a 2 year old meeting scheduler personal assistant service, for an undisclosed amount. Genee’s cofounders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee ‘plan to join Microsoft’, but it is unclear how big of a team the startup had and if it will migrate to Microsoft. Microsoft will use the acquisition on its Office 365 product suite. According to VentureBeat, Genee had raised $1.45 million from Aspiration Growth, Katrina Garnett, Streamlined Ventures, and UJ Ventures in August last year.
For its Q4FY16 financial results, Microsoft said that Office 365 had nearly 10 million subscribers in FY16. In total, it had over 23 million non-enterprise Office 365 subscribers till date and was growing 74% year-on-year. From both enterprise and general consumer segment, Microsoft added more than 50 million monthly active subscriptions from iOS and Android during FY16.
Microsoft’s recent acquisitions:
– In June, Microsoft acquired professional networking site LinkedIn in an all cash deal valued at $26.2 billion. In 2015, LinkedIn bought online tutorials and training platform Lynda.com for $1.5 billion.
– In April, carmaker Daimler AG said that Amazon and Microsoft were in talks with the company to acquire a minority stake in its digital mapping service HERE. The automotive industry consortium had purchased HERE from Nokia for over $3 billion in August last year.
– In February, Microsoft acquired the keyboard app SwiftKey for $250 million. Microsoft plans to launch its own Word Flow keyboard for Windows Phones and iOS, but it’s not clear if the company will integrate SwiftKey and Word Flow or keep them as separate apps.
– In June last year, Microsoft acquired 6Wunderkinder, the parent company and creator of the to do list app Wunderlist for an undisclosed amount.
– It had also acquired the calendar app Sunrise and the email app Acompli (for $200 million) in December 2014. However, in October last year, Microsoft said it would shutdown Sunrise Mobile Calendar after integration into Outlook completed.
Businesses Microsoft sold recently:
– In June, Microsoft sold 1500 patents to Xiaomi and would let the latter preload Office and Skype on Xiaomi devices.
– In the same month, Microsoft struck a deal with AOL to sell its display, mobile and video ads on Microsoft properties in the US and 8 other markets.
– In December last year, Microsoft had also sold its MixRadio music streaming service to the Japanese mobile messaging service LINE for an undisclosed amount.
– In June 2015, Microsoft sold a part of its Bing Maps technology to online cab hailing service Uber for an undisclosed amount.
Services Microsoft built recently:
– Last month, Microsoft built a new video streaming service for businesses called Stream which would enable organizations and employees to collaborate with video.
– In June, Microsoft said it would bring NFC payments to Windows 10 Mobile devices on a limited basis in the United States.
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