m&a

Most entrepreneurs are lucky to sell one start-up. A chosen few manage to repeat the feat, building and selling two or more businesses. The folks at Zimbra have outdone them all, selling the same company...twice.

As Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports, VMware is expected to soon announce the acquisition of open-source messaging company Zimbra from Yahoo. My own sources at VMware confirm the deal.

While Swisher's report gets the Zimbra ownership change correct, its indication of a distressed asset sale misses the mark.

It's true that Yahoo has never known what to do with Zimbra, … Read more

Maybe they read the Yelp review that says Google's headquarters is infested with skunks and raccoons.

Just a few days after reporting that Google was about 80 percent likely to be acquiring business reviews site Yelp for a totally sweet $500 million, TechCrunch has backtracked. Late Sunday, TechCrunch reported that Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman personally walked away from the deal and that company representatives informed Google over the weekend they aren't selling.

That's odd. People seemed to think it was generally a good deal. TechCrunch isn't exactly sure what went wrong but speculates that Yelp may … Read more

If Google's rumored $500m acquisition of Yelp goes through, the search giant may finally get a solid lock on the "hyperlocal" Web. But it'll also be acquiring a big community site--and those are notoriously hard to wrangle.

Restaurant industry blog Eater might have put it best: "One can only assume that with Google's muscle behind the site, the millions of users who log on to complain about restaurants would be able to say stupid stuff faster, and with more efficiency," editor Amanda Kludt wrote on Friday.

All snark aside, it's the same … Read more

Initially, it appeared that every successful open-source company would be swallowed up through acquisition. That may still happen, but as the mergers and acquisitions route dries up, it's increasingly likely that the best open-source companies could find themselves growing toward an initial public offering.

After all, they may not have any other choice.

JBoss, Zimbra, XenSource, and other companies rode an initial surge in interest in open source as a business and development strategy, each selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Since that time the pace of acquisitions has slowed as would-be buyers hunker down and ride out … Read more

Onetime social-networking pioneer Friendster unveiled a new design on Thursday, and it's focusing on the demographic that has kept it afloat for the past few years: the Asian youth market. And according to Reuters, Friendster may also be sold to a buyer in Asia by the end of the month for at least $100 million.

Yes, Friendster still exists. The first big social network to take off, it was surpassed by the likes of MySpace and Facebook, and its popularity in much of the world quickly faded. Now, it says it has 75 million registered users (no word on … Read more

If you stepped in late, it sounds awfully dull.

An announcement Tuesday tells us all that "certain assets" of a "white-label" online video service called Joost have been acquired by Adconion Media, which calls itself "the largest independent global audience and content network." The acquisition "will be able to provide advertisers, content owners, and Web site publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution," according to a statement from Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius. Financial terms were not disclosed. Yawn.

But really, it's an exceptionally anticlimactic … Read more

Sold!

Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.… Read more

Despite the broad and deep trend toward open-source software, it's telling that Red Hat remains the only large, pure-play open-source vendor.

Without a strong, standalone open-source leader, will commercial open source endure?

The obvious answer is yes, but there are reasons to think that the industry would benefit from a billion-dollar open-source company. Actually, several.

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that open source, which by its very nature tends to be decentralized and bottom-up in its growth, would benefit by concentrating wealth in a few hegemons.

David is nice, but the fact is that Goliath generally wins.

Take … Read more

The tractors, fuzzy pets, and mobster ambushes might be virtual, but the past few weeks have shown that the battle for social-gaming market share is very, very real.

Monday saw the long-rumored announcement of gamemaker Playfish's big-ticket sale to Electronic Arts, a big win for a product niche some had dismissed early on as faddish and silly. But it comes at a time when there's ongoing press blitz over how much social-gaming companies rely on lucrative but potentially misleading means of advertising in the form of lead-generating offers.

Both of these developments have changed the course of an … Read more