With StarCite Deal, Active Network Deepens Focus on Business Events

[Updated 1/5/12 8:05 am. See below.] San Diego’s Active Network (NYSE: [[ticker:ACTV]]) made roughly 50 acquisitions since it was founded (in 1998), but the company has become more deliberate about its deals since it paused in 2010 to overhaul its Software as a Service technology and prepare for last year’s IPO.

The Active Network provides Web-based event registration and related services, and most of its acquisitions have helped the company expand its business beyond online registration for recreational sporting events to include outdoor activities, online communities, and corporate business events. As CEO Dave Alberga told me in August, the company is now targeting a $10 billion market that wasn’t really apparent before the rise of Software as a Service.

Today the company is announcing its latest deal—the acquisition of StarCite, a Philadelphia, PA-based provider of Web-based meetings management, meetings procurement, and online event registration management. It reflects a more concerted focus by the Active Network on the multi-billion dollar business conference and events industry.

[Updates financial terms] In a regulatory filing this morning, the Active Network values the deal at $57.7 million in cash and stock, including $6.6 million in outstanding debt. StarCite has 300 employees and maintains offices in San Jose, CA, London, Dusseldorf, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to serve its target market of global 2,000-size companies. The privately held company was founded in 1999, and has received at least $15 million in venture funding from the ICG Group (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ICGE]]), TPG Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

One intriguing aspect about the deal is that it follows a strategic partnership with the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) that the Active Network disclosed a few days before Christmas. As part of this new alliance, the Active Network says it’s providing its

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.