m&a

Twitter announced Tuesday that it has "acquired" the four engineers and a designer from a Q&A start-up called Fluther. Fluther won't shut down, the two companies explained; though development on it will not continue, a community manager will continue to maintain it.

The Fluther product itself was not acquired by Twitter, making this a different kind of talent acquisition from those that Facebook has been making famous lately. Facebook has acquired companies like Drop.io and Hot Potato specifically for the engineers or product leaders behind them, but in those cases also acquired the software … Read more

In the entertainment press, reporters love to speculate over whether Brad and Angelina will finally get hitched. In the tech world, it's the decidedly unsexier AOL and Yahoo.

There's been a long parade of rumors suggesting that AOL may be looking to either ditch its not-dead-yet dial-up access business or merge with fellow attempting-a-turnaround tech conglomerate Yahoo; now, a report today from Reuters suggests it's attempting to do both. According to Reuters, AOL is exploring a "complicated series of transactions" in which it would sell off its access business to a prospective buyer and then … Read more

Amid rumors that it's about to be acquired by Google for an arguably ridiculous valuation, daily-deals company Groupon announced today the expansion of a Silicon Valley office and the acquisition of an advertising and commerce company called Ludic Labs. A price was not disclosed; always one for mocking the Valley rumor mill, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason put a "no comment" statement in his company's own press release and called the whole thing "rumors and speculation."

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based office has currently been housing some 25 employees who work on data and mobile … Read more

What happens when you throw a bunch of Chicago comedians into a complex of Silicon Valley engineers? Hilarity, maybe. Or one of the more unusual M&A gossip yarns of the past few years.

There's loads of talk right now about whether group-buying coupon service Groupon will sell to a big buyer or will hold out as an independent company in the hopes that it may become the world's leading name in local-business advertising. The barrage of rumors over Groupon is an interesting one--Yahoo wants it! Yahoo loses it! Google may be willing to fork over $4 … Read more

It wasn't revealed during Monday's announcement, but it turns out that Facebook's big "it's not e-mail" messaging overhaul involved one of the talent acquisitions that the company has become known for lately.

On Oct. 8, a start-up called Zenbe announced that it had shut down its Zenbe Mail e-mail product. CNET heard from a source last month that the reason was that Facebook had acquired part of Zenbe's intellectual property and brought some of the start-up's employees on board, but the deal was not clear at the time and neither Facebook nor … Read more

There's another big exit in social gaming, a field that's fast rolling up: Bay Area-based Ngmoco, which builds games for the iPhone, announced early Tuesday that it's set to be acquired by a Japanese mobile software and gaming company called DeNA. The price is $300 million in cash and stock, with up to an additional $100 million based on employee performance post-acquisition.

The goal for the acquisition is for DeNA to build out its mobile gaming network, Mobage, in Western markets. "Mobage has tens of millions of users in Japan who play many hundreds of applications … Read more

Yahoo has definitively agreed to acquire a company called Dapper to further hone its display advertising technology, the two companies announced today. A price was not disclosed, but it quite likely wasn't in the league of Yahoo's nearly $100 million purchase of Associated Content earlier this year.

"By combining Dapper's dynamic creative and real-time bidding technology platform with the largest and most successful leader in display advertising today, we expect to be able to bring advertisers and agencies greater efficiency and performance at a tremendous scale," explained a post on Dapper's Web site from … Read more

Facebook sent out e-mail invitations to Bay Area reporters and bloggers on Monday evening to announce an event at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters. The wording is vague: "Join Us for an Event."

It probably isn't a celebration of the fact that "The Social Network," the ambiguously fictionalized film retelling of Facebook's contested origins, was tops at the U.S. box office this weekend.

The massive social-networking company has been launching an unusually heavy number of product initiatives in the past few months, from a gaming notifications overhaul … Read more

A recent blog post from information service provider CB Insights reveals a truly shocking piece of news: Microsoft has announced zero acquisitions in 2010, while Google has acquired 23 companies, 75 percent of which are venture financed or angel-backed.

Somewhat perversely, Twitter, which still can't figure out a sustainable revenue model, made three acquisitions related to social media and analytics, while IBM absorbed much of the enterprise software market. In fact, there were only a few acquisitions--primarily hardware related--that wouldn't have been interesting to Microsoft.

There are no doubt a multitude of reasons why Microsoft hasn't been … Read more