There's A Whole New Class Of Companies Spending Hundreds Of Millions To Buy Startups

So far, 2012 has seen two major acquisitions in the tech space.

Avis bought Zipcar for $500 million. Then, yesterday, Athena Healthcare bought iPhone app maker Epocrates for $300 million.

GigaOm founder Om Malik points out that Avis and Athena are a new kind of a startup buyer – "big non-technology companies" that "need a new technology-centric way of thinking if they need to evolve their business models for the post iPhone world."

He expects to see more of these buyers in 2013:

Today it might not seem obvious, but a year or two from now, companies big and small are going to realize that emergence of mobile and other newer technologies are going to redefine the a business experience. As Ed Aten in a guest post pointed out this weekend, all businesses are now 24-hour operations. “The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity,” he wrote. And that also means inefficient businesses and other edifices of a different era.