TweetDeck is to be bought for $30m (£19m) by Silicon Valley firm UberMedia, according to a news report. The Financial Times said the takeover will be finalised next month. UberMedia, which has already bought other Twitter tools and services, such as UberTwitter and EchoFon. East London-based Tweet Deck launched in 2008, and has since generated […]
TweetDeck is to be bought for $30m (£19m) by Silicon Valley firm UberMedia, according to a news report. The Financial Times said the takeover will be finalised next month. UberMedia, which has already bought other Twitter tools and services, such as UberTwitter and EchoFon.
East London-based Tweet Deck launched in 2008, and has since generated more than 20 million downloads. The company’s free software updates and manages social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
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UberMedia was formerly known as TweetUp. The company is part of Idealab, a US business incubator founded by Bill Gross, the tech entrepreneur behind Overture – a search engine advertising technology which was sold to Yahoo in 2003 for $1.6bn, and is believed to have inspired Google’s business model.
TweetDeck rents its offices from Moo.com, a successful online printing service, and shares the premises with other tech start-ups such as GroupSpaces and SoundCloud.
The news comes after a second East London technology company Saffron Digital, was bought by smartphone company HTC for £30 million.
Last year the government launched an initiative for start-up technology companies in East London to rival Silicon Valley.
Naming the area from Shoreditch to Stratford ‘East London Tech City’, Prime Minister David Cameron said: “Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make East London one of the world’s great technology centres.”
