Yahoo! Makes Citizen Deal Official
As expected, Yahoo! announced Wednesday that it had signed an agreement to buy San Francisco-based Citizen Sports.
“Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports’ leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally,” senior VP Bryan Lamkin of Yahoo!’s Consumer Products Group said in the official release.
Mike Kerns, co-founder and CEO of Citizen Sports added: “Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice. We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”
As FSB.com mentioned in the previous report, Citizen came to market as ProTrade back in 2004. The company moved away from its central stock-trading game (now closed) in the past several years to focus on developing applications for social networks and smart phones. That effort included the November 2008 acquisitions of competing companies Sport Interactiva, FantasyBook and Sportacular.
The Yahoo! release says that Citizen brings applications for social networks Facebook, MySpace and hi5, and for the iPhone and Android — applying to sports from the prep level to the pros.
Yahoo! says the deal is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2010.
Tags: citizen sports, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, iphone, smart phones, social networks, yahoo
