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Mobile marketing company Yowza!! announced its acquisition by Spindle, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based mobile commerce company, last week for 1.642 million shares of Spindle’s stock and $500,000 in cash, Spindle CEO Bill Clark said.
The mobile advertising and coupon distribution platform developed by Yowza!! was extremely attractive to Spindle because the company “is really trying to bring together mobile marketing and mobile payments into a single infrastructure,” Clark said.
Spindle has been moving fast to accomplish this goal: including Yowza!!, they have acquired three companies over the past 12 months. That, Clark said, is the nature of mobile.
“Mobile is one of those things where every day there is new opportunities,” Clark said. “We’re not only trying to create new things, but we’re trying to create new things in a market that’s moving at over 100 miles an hour.”
Mobile’s fast pace “fits very well” in the LA atmosphere as Clark said it “is a very progressive technology-based city - and mobile is everywhere in LA.” Because of this, Spindle said it plans to keep the few employees on Yowza’s team in LA to maintain a presence in the city - although Scottsdale will now be the team's corporate address. This will allow Yowza!! to maintain the LA support network, which includes investors like Tech Coast Angels and celebrities Melissa Joan Hart and Greg Grunberg, that it has built up since it launched in 2009.
After the deal officially closes sometime over the next week, Clark said the Yowza and Spindle product teams will be sitting down to discuss exactly how Yowza’s mobile coupon app, which over 70,000 offline locations accept, will be incorporated into Spindle. But as for now, Clark said “it’s business as usual for the next couple of weeks.”
