partnership

Three years ago, when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook, it looked to be just a bit nutty.

Back then, Facebook was an unprofitable three-year-old company with a business model that the ad industry still wasn't fully believing, and the News Corp.-owned social network MySpace was still bigger than Facebook both in the U.S. and internationally. Facebook's paper valuation of $15 billion at the time of the investment was believed to have been embarrassingly overinflated because Microsoft had been in a bidding war with Google over the stake in question, and indeed, … Read more

There's a new partnership for GetGlue, a start-up that lets users "check in" to the movies or TV shows they're watching, music they're listening to, and books they're reading. The company announced Tuesday that it's partnered with four major book publishing houses to launch "stickers," the equivalent of Foursquare's achievement badges, for the season's biggest-ticket fiction and nonfiction books as well as bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and Paulo Coehlo.

On board are Hachette Book Group, Simon and Schuster, Random House, and Penguin. The largest publishing house that isn'… Read more

Google and AOL announced Thursday that they have extended--and expanded--their global partnership.

The two companies have signed a five-year renewal of their contract that will see Google continue to offer its search services to AOL's "content network and properties." Google will also continue to provide AOL with its advertising products across all of the latter's sites.

In addition, Google will now power AOL's mobile search, while AOL will make all of its video content available on YouTube.

The companies have agreed to a revenue-sharing agreement, but they didn't divulge the details of that deal.… Read more

NEW YORK--When you ignore the map, sometimes you take a wrong turn. That's what Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz admitted her company did a few years ago when it stopped devoting significant engineering resources to its Yahoo Maps product.

Bartz held a press conference Monday with Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to announce a partnership that will bring Yahoo's e-mail and messenger services to Nokia's Ovi service and Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo. While the story on the surface is that Yahoo is gradually shedding its properties that have fallen behind, handing over the reins of its … Read more

NEW YORK--Web portal Yahoo and cell phone maker Nokia announced Monday that they will extend their partnership, giving Nokia greater access to Yahoo's e-mail and messaging services and Yahoo access to Nokia's Navteq mapping technology.

The two companies have had a partnership since 2005. Yahoo services have already been preloaded on some Nokia devices. This new partnership extends that relationship so that Yahoo's e-mail and instant-messaging services will now be integrated with Nokia's Ovi Internet platform. Nokia's mapping services, which the Finnish company acquired from Navteq, will power Yahoo's mapping service.

Carol Bartz, CEO … Read more

The Android mobile app for game-like "check-in" app Gowalla is now live, as Mashable noted over the weekend. Launching its first non-iPhone app is an important step for the start-up as it competes fiercely with several other location-based mobile companies that are all trying to break away from the pack.

Additionally, Gowalla is set to announce a partnership with the Travel Channel for its series "Food Wars," a competitive reality show that pits chefs against one another in blind taste tests. When a Gowalla user checks into a "Food Wars"-featured restaurant, they'll … Read more

Here's another one of Facebook's gradual moves into the e-commerce world: The company announced Thursday a "strategic relationship" with eBay-owned payment system PayPal to make its technology available for the purchase of self-service ads as well as the Facebook Credits currency.

"We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service," Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook, said in a release. "As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for … Read more

In a move to show its 350 million members that it's serious about their safety, Facebook has launched a partnership with security firm McAfee: six months of McAfee's Internet Security Suite software, a discount subscription after that, and custom security software and education materials on Facebook.

"Facebook is applying all financial incentives from this partnership to the benefit of its users and will not be taking a share of any revenue from user subscriptions," a release explained. McAfee has also developed a free tool for Facebook users to clean their hard drives in the event that … Read more

Sound the alarms! The U.K.'s Telegraph news outlet has a story that seems to prove the unthinkable: that onetime social-networking rivals Facebook and MySpace could actually be working on some kind of partnership.

Two years ago this would've been a huge deal. Now? I'm really not surprised.

"The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third-party sites using their Facebook ID," the article by Emma Barnett explains.

It then quotes Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying … Read more