Microsoft pays $ 100 million for Sunrise
Microsoft announced the acquisition of Sunrise on 11 February. Microsoft paid $ 100 million for the acquisition. Sunrise, set up by Belgian Jeremy Le Van and the Frenchman Pierre Valade, became a huge success in just two years. The company’s calendar app already has more than 2.5 million regular users. It has also been announced by the New York Times as one of the favourites for “Best Calendar Apps for Setting your Agenda for the Days Ahead.”
The success is attributed to its attractive and user-friendly design. The calendar app gives you the opportunity to connect it to other social networks and integrate it with other apps so that all your appointments, events, birthdays, etc. can be found in one place. The app can also give weather forecasts and you can get directions via Google Maps to find where your appointments are. In addition, it easily integrates popular services such as SongKick (music events), TripIt (travel schedule) Evernote (to-do list) and Foursquare. Some describe Sunrise as being the Swiss Army knife of calendar apps due to its versatility.
Both Sunrise and Microsoft indicate that the Sunrise app will remain on the market after the acquisition. Jeremy Le Van, originally a graphic designer, explains: “Sunrise will remain independent and will stay in New York. We are integrating with Microsoft, just as Skype did, for example, but our way of working will stay the same. Despite having little funding, we have shown that our starting point was correct: during the past few years, the digital calendar has evolved very little. We therefore had to take it further and that is what we have done by integrating third party apps and focusing on design. Our way of working has not changed. We will continue with our developments and will have Microsoft’s resources at our disposal. We have an enormous number of projects coming up in the next few months, including taking appointments, for which there is still a lot of work to be done.”
Le Van is not the first Belgian tech entrepreneur to have been successful on the US market. Before him there were, for example, Sébastien de Halleux (Macrospace, Playfish), Bart Decrem (Tapulous) and Xavier Damman (Storify).