eBay Acquires WHERE

Today in a blog post eBay announced the acquisition of Boston-based WHERE, a local search app and a location-based advertising network. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but a price of $135 million in cash surfaced in some reports. WHERE has around 100 employees and raised $20 million from venture funds. the company had been profitable for about 18 months.

“Local commerce companies like WHERE are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping“, wrote Amanda Pires, Senior Director global communications at PayPal. “By giving people hyper-local, relevant retailer information and deals on their mobile phones, we see a huge opportunity for local merchants to reach more buyers, and for consumers to get more choice and value when they shop.“
“As a first step, we plan to integrate PayPal into the WHERE mobile app to make it even easier for PayPal customers to take advantage of the local deals. As John Donahoe said at analyst day, eBay Inc. is at the forefront of a new retail landscape, which is more convenient, more accessible, more local and – and more relevant to more consumers than ever before.“

The WHERE ad platform is serving around 2 Billion ads per month to 50 millions consumers across the United States. The WHERE mobile application has around 4 million active users across various platofrms: iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

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