The Irvine based company Local.com Corp. said that the news of Microsoft Corp. acquiring it is totally wrong. A fake press release went out last Thursday saying that the company was bought by Microsoft.

The rumor increased the share value of Local.com in the afterhours trading on Thursday. Speculators were seeing betting that Local.com could be the next Google Inc. that further made its shares chart board favorite.

Local.com runs a search engine that allows users to search for businesses and advertisers to target potential customers. It was said in the fake press release that Microsoft was buying Local.com for nearly $200 million or more, which is twice the company’s $80 million market value.

It is said that the news could bring back early days memories of Local.com as Interchange Corp., which experienced a big stock run-up in the beginning of this decade. The shares of company crashed in 2005 and since then have traded at a third or less than what they did in 2004.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Venture Capital Events, Venture Capital News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.