acquisitions

If Facebook wants to buy Opera Software, the Norwegian browser maker's price tag just went up.

After last week's rumors that Facebook was considering acquiring Opera, Opera's stock price leaped 20 percent, or 6.70 Norwegian kroner, to a price of about 41 kroner ($6.83) in trading today.

That gives the company a market cap of $811 million, or as Internet wags would have it with today's exchange rate, about 0.8 Instagrams.

That's a lot of money, even before any premium. And Opera founder Jon S. von Tetzchner, who controls 10.1 percent of its stock through Dvorzak Invest, … Read more

Facebook is in negotiations to acquire facial-recognition technology company Face.com, according to a report from Israeli business publication Calcalist (Google Translate).

The social-networking giant is said to be offering $80 million to $100 million, according to a report on Newsgeek.

CNET has contacted Facebook for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

The technology made a splash in 2009 when it released Photo Tagger, a free third-party application for Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to automatically tag photos of people, as well as a recognition-based alert service for Facebook. In 2010, Face.com released an open API … Read more

Airtime, the video startup founded by Napster duo Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, announced today that it had closed a second round of funding and had purchased another startup.

The mysterious company raised $25 million, according to a TechCrunch report. The startup also announced the acquisition of Erly, a company founded in 2011 that claims to provide a "new social platform for organizing and sharing your personal content." Terms of the deal were not revealed.

Erly was founded by CEO Eric Feng, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led Airtime's round of financing. … Read more

SAP America is looking to develop "the business network of the future" with the acquisition of cloud-based business commerce network Ariba at the price of $45 per share. That rounds out to roughly approximately $4.3 billion.

Each party brings something significant to the table here. Ariba already has the buyer-seller collaboration network, which is intended to compliment SAP's existing customer base as well as its B2B solutions. Thus, this really gives SAP a big push in the cloud space.

SAP will also be bringing its own resources to boost Ariba. For example, SAP is integrating its … Read more

After waiting months for the go-ahead to say so, Google CEO Larry Page today announced that his company now officially owns Motorola Mobility.

Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in August. Upon doing so, the companies had to clear regulatory hurdles to get the deal done. Regulators in both the U.S. and the European Union approved the acquisition back in February, but the companies were forced to wait for China. Over the weekend, China approved the deal, paving the way for Google to close it.

As part of the acquisition, Page announced today that … Read more

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