Barclaycard Acquires Social Couponing Startup Analog Analytics

Analog Analytics, the Solana Beach, CA-based entry in the online social coupon business, got its own deal of the day. Founder Ken Kalb says in a recent email to local business leaders that Barclaycard, a member of the Barclays global financial services giant, has acquired the four-year-old company.

As I reported a year ago, Analog Analytics provides its Groupon-like platform as a service for traditional publishers and broadcasters. At that time, Analog Analytics had more than 850 “old media” customers and was increasing revenue at a monthly compounded rate that Kalb estimated at roughly 50 percent.

I sought more details from Kalb over the weekend, but he declined to comment. Still, he must be feeling pretty good about ringing up another sale. Before founding Analog Analytics with Tom Buscher in 2008, Kalb was the CEO of SearchRev, a Palo Alto, CA-based search engine marketing company acquired by AKQA in late 2007.

Ken Kalb

When I talked with Kalb last year, Hillsboro, OR-based RadiSys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RSYS]]) had just acquired a previous startup, San Diego-based Continuous Computing, a Trillium-based wireless infrastructure technology provider, in a deal valued at $120 million.

A spokesman at Barclaycard’s U.S. headquarters in Wilmington, DE, hasn’t responded to my query about the deal.

In the note he sent out last week, Kalb says, “We will retain the Analog Analytics brand and our business model will

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.