In today’s Bulldog wrapup of technology news:
- GM buys Sidecar
- An outage hits Twitter
- WhatssApp drops renewal fee
- Chip firm Microchip Technology buys Atmel in $3.56 billion deal
The details:
- GM buys defunct ride-hailing company Sidecar
General Motors Co. says it has acquired defunct ride-hailing company Sidecar.
The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Sidecar ceased operations on Dec. 31.
GM says it will integrate some of Sidecar’s employees and assets into its own urban mobility team.
Sidecar, which was founded in 2012, offered three separate app-based services through its fleet of drivers: ride-hailing, car-pooling and deliveries. It operated in 10 U.S. cities, including Seattle and Boston, but struggled to compete with bigger rivals Uber and Lyft.
The acquisition of the San Francisco company is GM’s second major mobility deal this month. Earlier in January, the Detroit automaker invested $500 million in Lyft.
- Twitter disruption silences swaths of US, Europe for hours
Some Twitter users had to do without early Tuesday after sporadic outages knocked the social media site offline in the U.S. and Europe.
It was unclear how widespread the outages were, but by mid-morning on the East Coast, desktop and mobile versions of Twitter appeared to be working. And the company tweeted early in the afternoon that the issue had been resolved.
Twitter Inc., which has 320 million active users, said on its website that the six-hour-long disruption was related to a change in an internal code, which the company subsequently reversed, fixing the issue.
Earlier in the day, users said the service was not accessible on desktop computers.Twitter’s blog posts, corporate info and most other pages on the Twitter.com website were also inaccessible, displaying the blue error screen.
There were complaints of users receiving a “server error” just before 8 a.m. Eastern.
Twitter’s mobile app was partially functioning for some users but its timeline updated new tweets sporadically. Its search function appeared disabled as some hashtags or keyword searches returned no results. Users’ profile pages appeared to be accessible from the mobile app.
Third party services, such as the TweetDeck service, also returned a blank page.
Twitter has suffered several service disruptions so far this year. On Monday, some users could not access Twitter on mobile and web for about 10 minutes. The service wasdisrupted on Friday for about 20 minutes.
- WhatsApp to drop renewal fees for the messaging service
WhatsApp, a popular mobile messaging service owned by Facebook, says it will drop its 99-cent subscription fee over the next several weeks.
The company said Monday that charging the fee after one free year hasn’t worked well.
It says that many users don’t have a credit or debit card and are afraid of losing theservice when it’s time to renew.
WhatsApp says nearly a billion people around the world use the service.
Company officials say they don’t plan to introduce ads to offset the loss of fees. They say they will start testing tools this year to let customers communicate with banks and other businesses and organizations, but they aren’t providing details.
Facebook Inc. paid $22 billion to buy the messaging service in 2014.
- Microchip Technology to buy Atmel for $3.56B
Microchip Technology Inc. says it has a deal to acquire rival chipmaker Atmel for roughly $3.56 billion in cash and stock.
Atmel Corp., which is based in San Jose, California, said it broke off its merger with Dialog Semiconductor from September. It called Microchip’s offer “superior.”
Microchip and Atmel say their agreement is worth $8.15 per share, or $3.4 billion, excluding $155 million in Atmel’s cash and investments.
The deal has been approved by each company’s board of directors and is expected to close in the second quarter. It still needs the backing of Atmel’s stockholders.
Microchip said the combined company is expected to generate $170 million in savings and increased revenue beginning in fiscal 2019.
Chandler, Arizona-based Microchip makes semiconductors used in a variety of computers and electronic devices.
