Cisco buys pure digital, the maker of popular flip video camera, for $590M. Not bad for a company that has raised a total of $69M in funding. That’s almost a ten bagger.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc is buying digital camcorder-maker Pure Digital Technologies as it seeks to push further into the consumer market.
The world’s largest maker of computer networking equipment said on Thursday it would pay $590 million in stock to purchase all of privately held Pure Digital’s shares.
It will also pay up to $15 million in retention-based incentives to employees who continue at the acquired company, Cisco said in a statement.
Pure Digital, based in San Francisco, is backed by venture capital investors including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital.
Mike Arrignton has a nice post about pure digital’s story of try and try until you succeed.
Techcrunch reports that pure digital, maker of poplular flip video cameras, is close to being acquired by Cisco.
Flip cameras - dead simple and small video devices that are tailored towards users who want to upload video to the Internet - have become massively popular. One source says the company has sold more than $200 million worth of the tiny cameras in the last couple of years. Based on reviews of the recently released Flip Mino HD, we’re not surprised. The devices cost between $130 and $230 and have spawned a large group of copy cat competitors.
If this is really true, it is an interesting move by Cisco. Cisco sees video as a major area of opprtunity for the company. They are already in consumer video market through their acquisition of sicentific atlanta a maker of TV settop boxes. They are also pushing telepresence technology, next gen video conferencing system. Flip video cameras make it very easy to capture video and post it to the websites such as Youtube or stream it live using sites such as ustream and justintv. Cisco benefits if more people capture and post video to the web. But why do they need to buy this company? It appeas they want to expand their consumer video product portfolio.
Will video be the next killer app for mobile? Cisco, who is hoarding cash for acquisitions, seems to think so.
“Almost 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video within the next five years, according to Cisco’s latest VNI (Visual Networking Index) Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013 released Feb. 10. They key driver of the mobile traffic will be laptops, netbooks and smartphones connecting to the network.
Overall, Cisco predicts global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 131 percent over that same five-year period. The growth rate primarily reflects the anticipated migration of users to a 4G mobile Internet that will allow consumers to view more mobile video and access a variety of mobile broadband services.”