acquisitions

As Google prepares to close its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the company could be considering laying off some Motorola employees, a new report suggests.

According to TechCrunch and its unnamed sources, Google will launch a "listening tour" around Motorola to see what its employees do at the company. Based on that information, Google could decide to lay off some Motorola employees. TechCrunch didn't say how many employees Google might layoff, but did say that the sources believe the decision could come "imminently."

Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility in August for $12.5 billion, … Read more

Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility will finally close by Wednesday.

Motorola Mobility announced in a Form-8K filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission that now that the Bureau of the Ministry of the Commerce of China has cleared Google's acquisition, the companies will finalize the transaction "within two business days."

China announced on Saturday that it had approved the acquisition, making it the last major regulator to give the deal the green light. Both the U.S. Justice Department and European Union regulators approved the acquisition in February.

Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility in August for $12.5 billion, … Read more

Facebook knows mobile is its Achilles' heel, but I didn't expect the company to take such aggressive actions to solve its mobile problem.

The social network admitted to the weakness earlier this month when it amended its IPO filing. "If users increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our financial performance and ability to grow revenue would be negatively affected," the company explained in its amended S1.

Facebook … Read more

Twitter has hired the team behind RestEngine, a 2.5-year-old company that focuses on e-mail marketing.

RestEngine describes itself as a "social marketing automation solution" aimed at app developers and publishers. The company serves up personalized marketing e-mails. Some of its customers include RockYou, UStream, and CrowdStar.

TechCrunch first reported news of the deal, which the outlet says was completed in late April. RestEngine alerted users about the move in a note on its Web site today: … Read more

Micron on Thursday confirmed that it is in discussions to acquire Japan-based Elpida, one of the largest memory chip manufacturers in the world.

"Micron Technology...today confirmed it is engaged in discussions with Elpida Memory's trustees to acquire Elpida's business," the Boise, Idaho-based chipmaker said in a statement.

Elpida was formed in 1999 when NEC and Hitachi merged their memory chip businesses. But the price volatility of the memory market eventually took its toll, and the company filed for bankruptcy in February with $5.6 billion of debt, despite having become the world's third-largest maker … Read more

Hot on the heels of raising a $70 million funding round, the popular note-taking service Evernote is announcing today that it has acquired Cocoa Box Design, publishers of the iPad handwriting app, Penultimate.

The Penultimate note-taking app currently has integration into Evernote: You can send pages you create in the app to a linked Evernote account. It integrates with Dropbox the same way.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin told me the app won't be changed substantially, though integration into Evernote will be made tighter. "The important thing is to not break it," Libin says. Evernote will, however, put … Read more

LinkedIn announced today it has agreed to acquire presentation-sharing Web site SlideShare for $118.8 million.

San Francisco-based SlideShare, which helps professionals discover people through content and vice versa, had nearly 29 million unique visitors in March, according to market analyst ComScore. Since SlideShare's founding in 2006, its users have uploaded more than 9 million presentations.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based business-networking giant is buying the San Francisco-based company in a cash and stock deal that is expected to close in the second quarter.

"Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their … Read more

Was Facebook's acquisition of Instagram motivated by paranoia?

That is the theory behind a VentureBeat report that Mark Zuckerberg rushed the negotiation process for the photo-sharing app to keep it out of Twitter's hands. The report contends that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom first received an offer and term sheet from Twitter and then leveraged that for a $1 billion payday earlier this month from the social-networking giant.

Systrom used a pending funding round with Sequoia and Greylock to pressure Twitter to make an offer, a source tells VentureBeat. However, Instagram reportedly did not sign the offer, said to … Read more

Facebook shocked the tech community with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, but perhaps more shocking is the price the photo-sharing app's CEO originally wanted for his company: $2 billion.

During three days of quiet negotiations, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg halved Kevin Systrom's asking price -- all without involving bankers or his own board of directors, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). In fact, Zuckerberg, who controls roughly 57 percent of the company's voting rights, had pretty much closed the deal with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom before even informing the board of … Read more