m&a

Amid stormy economic seas, auction giant eBay has thrown overboard StumbleUpon, the recommendation and "discovery" start-up that it purchased in 2007 for approximately $75 million.

Replacing corny nautical puns with corny alcohol puns, this looks like a symptom of the hangover that followed eBay's acquisition binge during Web 2.0's heyday. Even though many speculated that eBay would use StumbleUpon's technology to power product recommendations, the two companies just didn't find a fit--or a way to make a decent return. eBay's acquisition habits have been more vocally criticized when it comes to Skype, … Read more

A reviewing and recommendation company called Living Social, which makes the popular "Pick Your Five" app for Facebook (and other social networks), has acquired BuyYourFriendaDrink.com.

BuyYourFriendaDrink describes itself in a press release as an "automated sampling solution for the beer, wine and spirits industry," but don't let that fool you. It's really a way for you to remotely buy drinks for your friends when you lose bets to them.

You pay up, your friend gets a text-message or e-mail code that the bartender enters into the system, and your friend gets a drink. … Read more

Brightkite, one of the half-dozen or so companies vying for market share in the location-based social-networking space, has merged with another mobile start-up called Limbo. The official branding of the company will be Brightkite now, but its home base will now be at Limbo's headquarters in Burlingame, Calif.

Limbo's focus is on mobile games, as well as text-message alerts: sports scores, celebrity gossip, weather, horoscopes, and the like.

It's not totally clear how the two will merge their technologies, but a little bit of background was provided on the Brightkite blog. Brightkite will have access to Limbo'… Read more

Last week, TechCrunch reported on rumors that Google was in "late-stage talks" to buy microblogging service Twitter.

Kara Swisher responded to this post in her own blog, dousing the fire with sourced comments such as, "There was a discussion...about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary."

The question is not whether Google and Twitter are talking. They are. If they weren't, it would be news in itself. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who's been doing deals in Silicon Valley for nine years, says, "They'… Read more

So should News Corp. buy Twitter? That's what Vanity Fair columnist and pundit Michael Wolff speculated this week in an article on Newser.com, the aggregation site he founded.

"There may not be anything less than Twitter that can distract Wall Street from News Corp.'s stubborn and, at this point, unnatural newspaper fetish," Wolff wrote, "and, as well, convince it, for one last hurrah, that (CEO Rupert Murdoch) isn't...well, gone."

The catalyst for Wolff's recommendation was the recent hire of former AOL chief Jon Miller as head of News Corp.'s … Read more

Every year, spring brings gives us two things: another rendition of the Open Source Business Conference and rumors of Oracle buying Red Hat, plus various other activities related to open-source consolidation.

In years past, OSBC has taken flight with rumors of Zend (false!), JBoss (true!), MySQL (true!), etc. on the block, with Oracle often the proposed buyer.

This year is no different, as Barron's has obliged by printing yet another rumor that Oracle is planning to invade Raleigh, N.C., to take Red Hat captive.

The source of the rumor is Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. … Read more

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has put forward a compelling argument as to how Sun will monetize open-source software.

Fortunately, he may never need to, as it seems all-but-certain that IBM will acquire Sun, perhaps as early as this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In a nutshell, Schwartz argues that chief information officers decide to pay for for value, and value is more than just software. Schwartz seems to be suggesting that open source makes a great complement to a larger systems business, and/or that for mission-critical tasks, CIOs will pay to ensure that a company stands … Read more

IBM is in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Sun has struggled to revive its financial prospects in the wake of declining interest in its Solaris operating system and associated hardware. Open source has been the big bright spot for Sun, but Sun's ability to recoup hardware losses with free software has been suspect.

IBM could fix that. IBM knows how to make money from software, and it could lend a hard-edged pragmatism to Sun's open-source idealism.

The Journal reports on the culture clash between the two companies, which could complicate the deal. … Read more

Reading the excellent analysis of Arjen Lentz, founder of MySQL training company Open Query, of what the open-source database leader MySQL is (and isn't) makes me wish that Oracle would have discovered MySQL as a complement, rather than as a competitor, several years ago.

MySQL's is the database software of choice for the Web, period. Oracle's is the database software of choice for the enterprise, period. It's unclear, as Lentz points out, that this means one is better than the other--and why we need to keep talking about competition between them:

MySQL doesn't have to … Read more