Group buying is taking off in SA in a big way – the number of group buying websites are still growing every day, and if your site has its foothold already, with all the deals in place, its clearly worth a lot. South African online marketplace and auction site bidorbuy.co.za has acquired Cape Town-based social buying site UbuntuDeal.co.za. This is the latest addition to the bidorbuy group of sites, which include Jobs.co.za, Jump.co.za, TheClassifieds.co.za, PayFast.co.za and Snaply.com.

According to bidorbuy CEO Jaco Jonker, UbuntuDeal complements the bidorbuy online marketplace: “While bidorbuy enables sellers to sell online to buyers far beyond their geographical locality, UbuntuDeal brings online audiences through the doors of local businesses. On top of that, bidorbuy focuses on products, and UbuntuDeal is more oriented towards entertainment and leisure experiences. Together, we are poised to bring some very exciting shopping events to the South African internet audience”

Launched in November 2010, UbuntuDeal is based on the business model of collective buying power. Every day, a heavily discounted deal is placed on the site on behalf of one of the participating merchants. If a certain number of people buy, the deal becomes available to all. If not, the deal is off. Currently, the site has daily deals in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Bloemfontein, East London and Port Elizabeth, ranging from restaurant vouchers and spa treatments to hotel stays and even Wi-Fi internet access.

For consumers, online group buying means great discounts. For businesses, it is a good way to turn available surpluses into cash and to market their services to a very wide audience without spending exorbitant amounts on marketing. Jess Green, Managing Director of UbuntuDeal, says that the social buying business model took off in 2010 and expects further growth this year, both internationally and locally. He adds that UbuntuDeal has clear advantages in this very competitive market: “We always feature deals that offer between 50% and 90% discounts, not less, giving the consumer a bigger and better deal. We pride ourselves on being a step ahead in terms of customer service and web site functionality. Last but not least, the merchants we team up with are happy with the whole process and their marketing exposure.”

Simple as the online group buying business model looks, the real challenge is attaining the critical mass of users. “This is where bidorbuy, a high traffic site with over one million visitors per month, will play a key role”, says Jaco.

Jaco adds that bidorbuy has recently launched a ‘deal of the week’ offering, which aims to offer the best deals for the South African audience on brand new, consumer products. “With the acquisition of UbuntuDeal, bidorbuy is now in a position to offer both product and experience deals to its audience, the largest e-commerce audience in the country.

Look out for the interview with UbuntuDeal this week on BandwidthBlog. Charl Norman will be interviewing Jess Green, Ubuntudeal’s founder for our SA tech startups video series. Look at last week’s interview with Adii for a taste of what to expect!

If you’re a South African blogger, then chances are you’re familiar with the ups and downs that blog aggregator Amatomu has experienced over the past couple of years.

Once the darling of the SA blogging community, Amatomu began to show signs of strain after its original creators, Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher, left the company that owned the site (Mail & Guardian Online). The repeated downtime eventually got so bad that many top bloggers in the country reluctantly removed the code from their blogs, as it was presumed to be causing errors and slowing down page-load times.

Registered Amatomu users this week received an email explaining that the site has now been taken over by Creative Spark Interactive. What makes this particularly good news is that Creative Spark is Matthew Buckland’s new project – so in a sense, Amatomu is going back home.

The Creative Spark team says, “We are passionate about amatomu.com and believe it has a bright future. We are aware of the stability issues the site has experienced, and we have made significant changes to improve uptime. We do monitor the site daily and respond to all technical complaints and issues. We will also be working on the core architecture of the site during the course of the year to increase stability.”

They’ve also called for any PHP developers interested in playing a role (either part-time or full-time) to make contact with them.

Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter in Amatomu’s story – a happier one this time.

This just in – Internet marketer and entrepreneur Randolf Jorberg just blogged the news that eTRAVELi has acquired Cape Town based Travelstart’s Nordic operations – this adds just another success story to serial entrepreneur Stephan Ekberghs list of achievements. Travelstart is a South African company and generated sales of approximately ZAR 1.5 billion during 2009. eTRAVELi and Travelstart combined produce a monster booking engine with expected revenues of 5 billion (Rand and Swedish kronor are nearly on par) in 2010. The report does not state the acquisition price, we are waiting for a reply from Stephan with further details.

Reportedly brokering 50,000 bookings a month on the Travelstart SA platform, Travelstart is a travel giant in the e-commerce market of South Africa and I do seriously hope that this is not the last positive news we hear from this travel powerhouse, operating from Cape Town.

Update from Stephan -

Just to clear some basic facts:
The Deal covers our european business and our brand in Europe.
We will still continue to do business outside of EU with our new global HQ in Cape Town.
Our main efforts will be directed towards continental Africa for a while as well as launching a global kick ass mobile app.
Our ZA business is doing very well and we expect to break the 1 billion zar mark in 2011.

Come by and see us at 56 Shortmarket.

I have written some personal reflections on the sale on my blog:
http://ekbergh.blogspot.com/2010/01/when-to-let-go-2930-decade-with.html

(edit – we have fixed our confusing headline)

MSNBC, the joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, has acquired the Chicago based hyper-local information site EveryBlock in a several million dollar deal.

The two year-old experiment in hyper-local news is available in 15 cities (New York, San Francisco, and Seattle to name a few) deeply covers local communities with a range of topics which span from announcements to news coverage, blog entries, civic data, photos and dozens of other types of information — just by typing your address, neighborhood name or ZIP code.

The evident aim of the acquisition is to compete with local newspapers and other forms of media. EveryBlock is capable of providing stunning stats for specified local areas which strengthens the base of MSNBC.com making it a more vivid news source. It is all about weaving more local results into the site and this could even assist the new search engine Bing.

Founded in 2007, with a $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we have to agree that this is a wonderful achievement for a start-up company with just six employees. What’s even more interesting is that MSNBC plans to keep EveryBlock independent and will help it continue grow to other cities, too.

[via NYTimes]

Google has acquired On2 Technologies in a stock for stock transaction which will see each outstanding share of On2 common stock being converted into $0.60 worth of Google class A common stock.

The overall acquisition cost for Google is $106 million and Google has taken this step to thoroughly use On2 futuristic video compression techniques for its own expansion. YouTube currently lacks ways that could assist High-Definition HD Video conversions and compressions, which means that the deal is much needed considering the bright future Google sees for their service.

The deal is expected to close by the fourth-quarter of this year and the investors look already pleased as the On2 stock closed 62% over the premium at the close of yesterday.

Google is certainly feeling the pressure with its contemporaries expanding its domains and this deal will have surely relaxed the nerves a bit. Now it can further evolve the immensely successful YouTube to newer heights.

[via TechCrunch]

Naspers, the largest media company in Africa and owner of popular South African portal 24.com, is offering USD 19.3-million for 100% of the Polish Internet portal Bankier.pl.

Bankier.pl offers financial news, market analysis and comparison-shopping information of financial products.

According to Corporate Information, Bankier.pl derives its profits mostly from on-line advertising and finance mediation.

Naspers will incorporate the newly acquired Bankier.pl with Allegro, an Eastern European internet business which operates e-commerce trading platforms in Hungary and Czech Republic.

(via)