After months of negotiation MediaMiser Ltd., Ottawa based media monitoring firm, has taken over Gatineau start-up InfoGlutton Solutions.
The deal, which was for an undisclosed price, will give Mediamiser access to InfoGlutton’s automated social media monitoring technology, as well as bringing over InfoGlutton co-founder David Nadeau to be Mediamiser’s new chief technology officer.
“We have always believed that if you are going to be successful in the Ottawa community, you going to have to collaborate,” says Mediamiser co-founder and CEO Brett Serjeantson.
“Bringing them on will make us that much better and push us that much farther ahead of our competition, ” he adds.
Founded in 2009 as part Ontario Talent First’s Lead to Win program, InfoGlutton artificially measures the positive or negative tone of Facebook comments, tweets and social media.
“We having been manually doing the toning of social media ourselves for years and we have done a pretty good job. But [InfoGlutton] brings it to a whole new level,” says Serjeantson.
“By having the automated toning, we can be more efficient and offer an even better product to our clients.”
Serjeantson says he had been in contact with Nadeau and InfoGlutton since 2010 but the opportunity for the acquisition came up in February 2011.
Nadeau says though it took a long time to get the deal between Mediamiser and InfoGlutton finalized, the acquisition gave them time to get to know each other and make sure it was a good fit.
“You can’t do a deal without taking the risk of exposing your business,” says Nadeau.
“You have to share some of your secrets, and when you are the small company showing your business plan to the big company it can be scary because you don’t know what they will do.”
Serjeantson says what made this deal successful was that they were able to put trust at the forefront.
Nadeau says he is excited because “we share the passion of monitoring the media and extracting the juice, and together we and much stronger at doing it.”
With InfoGlutton’s technology, Serjeantson says they will be able to offer an affordable solution to small and medium size businesses looking to monitor social media.
Prior to the acquisition Mediamiser had focused its business on larger clients such as Air Canada, The City of Calgary and law firm McCarthy Tétrault LLP.
With the merger, Mediamiser will hire two of InfoGlutton’s three employees and brings the Mediamiser staff to almost 50 people.
Less than a week after the acquisition, Mediamiser also announced the launch of a new iPhone application.
The WIM News app, short for “What’s In Media”, allows users to sort through the top news stories of the day.
“It uses Mediamiser’s technology to categorize the stories that are the most popular and tailor it to the subject you like the best,” says Jim Donnelly, director at Mediamiser.
“If you are interested in business news from Europe or sports news from Africa, you can focus it on whatever you are interested in.”
The app also includes a url shortener, W.IM, to allow users to share the news stories online through social media websites.
Ever expanding, Mediamiser has just moved into its renovated office at Holland Cross in Westboro and continues to live up to it’s title as one of Ottawa’s fastest growing companies as designated by the Ottawa Business Journal.