In a nutshell, both Cocoafish and Appcelerator are in the business of making mobile development a lot easier, and the latter has just announced its acquisition of the former. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Appcelerator is a mobile platform company, and Cocoafish provides a suite of APIs for mobile infrastructure. Together, the combined entity will include even more tools for developers to quickly churn out feature-rich and engaging applications for smartphones and tablets.

“Nearly all of our developers and customers have been manually adding cloud service functionality to their mobile applications since we launched Appcelerator’s Titanium Platform three years ago,” said Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie in a release.

“Cocoafish is by far the most complete mobile cloud solution, and combined with [Appcelerator's] Titanium Platform, Appcelerator is delivering everything a developer needs to build rich, connected applications.”

Cocoafish’s cloud-based products include more than 25 mobile features such as including location, push notifications, photo editing, and social and sharing features.

Also, Appcelerator said it will publish iOS, Android, JavaScript, and REST SDKs so app developers using Objective C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha, and HTML5 can build instantly scalable server-side backends, add network features without writing code on the server side, and deploy apps with a single click.

By the end of Q1, these features will be integrated into Appcelerator’s current offerings. The acquiring company expects to launch Cocoafish as “Appcelerator Cloud Services” (ACS) early in the second quarter. At that point, the Cocoafish features will be integrated with the Titanium Platform with cross-platform SDK support for non-Titanium developers. The cloud services will be priced according to usage in a tiered system.

Appcelerator has been on something of an acquisition spree lately. Late last year, the company bought Particle Code, the HTML5 mobile platform that turned heads (and won official recognition) at DEMO in 2010.

The company also acquired Aptana in January 2011, which brought an enterprise-grade IDE into the fold.

It’s worth noting that Appcelerator closed a $15 million round of funding just a few short months ago; we’re sure the extra cash was helpful for making this strategic acquisition.

Image courtesy of Monkey Business Images, Shutterstock

Business social-media giant LinkedIn is acquiring Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that enhances contact information.

Sources close to the negotiation disclosed the news and said that LinkedIn is paying over $10 million to buy the company, All Things D reported. The final purchase price is undisclosed, no deal has been finalized, and both companies are keeping quiet about the details. VentureBeat reached out to Rapportive’s chief executive Rahul Vohra for comment and didn’t get a response.

Rapportive is a Gmail-only plugin that adds shared content, tweets, social media buttons, and notes to your Google Contacts. The plugin lives in the sidebar of Gmail, next to each email. When Google introduced the People Widget, the sidebar that displays contact info next to emails, Rapportive integrated its service directly into the widget.

The company faces competition from Contactually, which launched in early January 2012.

Rapportive’s investors include Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, incubator Y Combinator, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Dave McClure’s new fund 500 Startups, Nivi & Naval Ravikant’s VentureHacks, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and BOLDstart Ventures.

Adku provides a service that attempts to “optimize” a person’s shopping experience by providing product suggestions on sites like Zappos, eBay, and Amazon. It does this by using various data about each shopper such as location and hot news trends.

The startup was founded by three former Google engineers and has remained in stealth-mode since it launched at the AngelPad Demo event in 2010. It’s unknown exactly how Groupon will use Adku’s technology or what the startup’s six employees will be working on. Groupon, which has been accused of being weak on the technology side, will benefit from Adku if only for their product.

The purchase price is rumored to be in the range of $10 million, according to TechCrunch.

“We started talking to Groupon to bring our technology to more customers and quickly realized that we wanted to be a deeper part of a company that people love and is empowering merchants and customers in a way that’s never been done before,” wrote Adku chief executive Ajit Varma in a blog post.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based startup previously secured funding from Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, True Ventures, and AngelPad.

It’s a match made in heaven, and we wish these crazy kids the best.

The two services, while complementary, are not identical, so bringing the SkillSlate product and team into the fold will also allow TaskRabbit to broaden its own product and release some new features.

In a blog post on the acquisition, TaskRabbit co-founder Leah Busque and CEO/co-founder Eric Grosse write,

SkillSlate crowdsources its network of service providers to help its customers with any task they need done or alternatively, provide instruction on a particular skill they’d like to develop. Sound familiar? SkillSlate is certainly similar to TaskRabbit, particularly in the sense that it’s a service marketplace. What makes SkillSlate unique, though, is its focus on skill-based and artistic tasks – including personal training, tutoring, DJing and even fire dancing. By integrating SkillSlate’s platform with TaskRabbit’s, we will be able to provide an even more enhanced service – one where folks can get help with practically anything.

While the teams couldn’t disclose the terms of the deal, a TaskRabbit spokesperson revealed in an email to VentureBeat that the entire SkillSlate team is planning to relocate to San Francisco.

“TaskRabbit launched in New York this past summer, and the area has already become our second largest market,’ the rep noetd. “Combining our user base with SkillSlate’s will surely bolster our presence and growth on both coasts.”

The conversations about an acquisition had been going on for several months, the rep told us.

“Both TaskRabbit and SkillSlate are First Round Capital portfolio companies, so we have known about each other for some time. When looking at our two services, merging the two makes perfect sense. As far as timing goes, the acquisition goes perfectly with our expansion strategy, though the announcement being right after our Series B was announced is coincidental.”

TaskRabbit’s $17.8 million round of funding was closed in December 2011. The deal was the startup’s second round of institutional funding; TaskRabbit also raised a $5 million round in May 2011. To date, TaskRabbit has raised a total of $24.7 million in venture capital and seed money.

Overall, the year saw a 14 percent drop in deal activity between 2010 and 2011. Dow Jones VentureSource‘s data shows 522 total exits for the year — that’s 69 deals fewer than in 2010.

However, companies in 2011 were exiting earlier than yesteryear’s counterparts. They took less capital along the way, and they also generated more money during their exit events than did exiting companies in 2010.

Throughout the past year, all exit activity combined brought in $53.2 billion, representing a 26 percent increase in capital raised from similar deals in 2010. Also, the median price paid for an acquired company rose by 77 percent to $71 million in 2011.

“Despite a slower acquisition pace capped with an uncharacteristic drop in deal activity in the fourth quarter, there are some positive signs heading into the new year,” said VentureSource global research director Jessica Canning in a statement.

“Acquisitions of companies liquidating their assets were halved in 2011 and companies are benefiting from lower start-up costs by taking capital farther toward a larger acquisition.”

Venture-backed startups that exited in 2011 raised a median of $17 million in venture capital each, a 12 percent decrease from exiting companies in 2010. These startups had a median age of 5.3 years, a slight drop from a 5.4-year median age startups that exited in 2010.

Despite heavy turbulence in the general market beginning in August, 2011, the $5.4 billion raised from 45 startup IPOs in 2011 was higher by a significant percentage than the $3.3 billion raised by 46 such events in 2010.

Although a record number of IPOs were delayed in the week following the U.S. credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s (and although a few IPOs went overseas), the year ended on a high note largely due to two IPOs: those of Groupon and Zynga, which raised $1.7 billion between them.

“The IPO market saw some gains through the first half of the year, but the momentum was not strong enough to survive the volatility in August,” said VentureSource editor Zoran Basich in a statement. “During 2012 we’ll get a sense of whether the last two years of flat IPO activity is the new normal for the industry or if there’s room to grow.”

Finally, 2011 saw a slump in fourth-quarter acquisition activity. Acquisitions in the fourth quarter were below third-quarter activity for the first time in five years. For all of 2011, 460 venture-backed startups were acquired for a total of $46.4 billion. These figures represent a 13 percent decrease from the number of M&As in 2010, but the amounts were up from 2010′s $35.6 billion total.

In 2011, buyouts accounted for 17 deals and $1.4 billion, both figures down from 32 deals and $3.4 billion in 2010.

The Chinese company has hired a Washington, DC-based lobby firm and a law firm specializing in cross-border mergers and acquisitions — likely a necessary step in the foreign, censorship-heavy entity’s plan to take over a major U.S. corporation.

Alibaba has hired the Duberstein Group, an independent strategic political planning and consulting company headed by Kenneth Duberstein (pictured), Reuters reports. Duberstein is a longtime Washington insider who served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in the late 1980s.

The Chinese web company has also hired the acquisition-focused law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to act as an intermediary in the matter. The firm’s practice centers around international takeovers; it claims to have conducted the first cross-border Morris Trust transaction (meaning all the acquired company’s assets other than those being acquired were spun off into a new public company, with the remaining assets being merged with the buying company — all without any tax being incurred).

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma publicly stated back in October that he wanted to buy Yahoo, lock, stock and barrel.

“We are very interested in Yahoo,” Ma said at the time. “Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo, and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

The complicating factor is Yahoo’s ownership of a large stake in Alibaba — 40 percent, to be precise. However, Alibaba began raising the necessary $4 billion to buy back that stake. Yahoo seems to be acquiescing — and it might also be selling back its stock in Japan’s Softbank. If Yahoo released its hold on these Asian entities, it would stand to gain around $17 billion from the combined transactions.

Just last month, Ma and several other Chinese web executives explicitly pledged to support government censorship of their properties and the Chinese Internet. In a three-day meeting with the State Internet Information Office in Beijing, the executives said they would “conscientiously safeguard the broadcasting of positive messages online” and “resolutely curb the spread of rumours online.”

The acquisition, which may be a talent grab, brings Quorus co-founders Michael Dougherty (pictured) and Sameer Rayachoti into the Amazon fold.

Currently, all Quorus employees are now working at Amazon, we’ve learned from an anonymous source with close ties to the deal.

While the team can’t comment on what they’re building for the e-commerce giant, they say they’re very excited about their new roles.

Dougherty previously co-founded real estate-focused startup Redfin and worked on consumer services and ad products at Zillow, another real estate web search tool.

Rayachoti is listed on LinkedIn as a Quorus co-founder. He also worked at Redfin and Zillow, but his Silicon Valley career started with a three-and-a-half-year tour at Amazon, where he was a software developer beginning in 2001.

Another team member, Peter Abrahamsen, was a design and engineering grad student and a Quorus senior software engineer — at least until November 2011, when he changed his LinkedIn profile to reflect Amazon as his new employer.

The Quorus product is one of several social-shopping products floating around the web these days. The basic idea is that you’d get advice and feedback from friends while considering various online purchases — not unlike the premise behind Tara Hunt’s Buyosphere.

Specifically, Quorus allowed shopping sites to add push-button IM features to their product pages, as seen in the image above. One client for the IM product was Zappos, itself an Amazon-owned property.

All the Quorus team members we’ve researched are based in Seattle, Washington, which is also the location of Amazon’s headquarters.

The acquisition is thought to be a talent grab. The Campfire Labs team includes Sakina Arsiwala, Sebastian Heycke, Shruti Challa and Naveen Koorakula.

TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters noticed that Groupon now controls the CampfireLabs.com web domain.

Campfire co-founder and engineer Arsiwala was previously YouTube’s Head of International at Google. Before that, she was a product lead for Google search, and she kicked off her Silicon Valley career with a three-year run at Altavista followed by a two-year stint at Yahoo.

Koorakula, also a co-founder, worked at Yahoo during the same time period as Arsiwala. His primary expertise was in search technology engineering. He was also on the founding team of Powerset, the super-hyped search startup that was acquired by Microsoft mere weeks after its launch.

Both co-founders have master of science degrees in computer science. Heycke is a design guy, and Challa is the startup’s marketing and business development arm.

So, what does a startup composed of search gurus have to do with Groupon?

According to the company’s self-description, its team “wants to change the way people think of social interactions in the real world and online…

“We are tackling very complex algorithmic, technology and product problems. We’re building systems designed to scale. Some tools in our toolkit — JavaScript (Node.js, JavaScript MVC), Hypertable, Hadoop, C++ and Ruby. We like unit testing, continuous integration and contributing to open source.”

One of the startup’s early products was released last fall at Kenyon College. Called Slice, it integrating with existing social networks and web-based tools, including Facebook and email, to help students organize their connections and interactions from a central location.

Challa told the college’s newspaper that Slice’s features included a real-time IM client and event-planning and media-sharing tools. Slice also included a Turntable.fm-like music-playing and -sharing platform.

It’s unknown how or whether Campfire Labs’ technology will be integrated into Groupon’s current or future offerings.

Clever Sense is known for producing the popular recommendation mobile app Alfred, a robotic concierge that acts as a Pandora for real life. Unlike many web apps that rely on data, Alfred learns your tastes by discovering patterns Recently, the company released a new version of the app that adds the ability to perform group recommendations. The app is expected to remain functional and available to users for the time being.

While financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, we do know that the Clever Sense team will join Google’s local services division. “Google helps local businesses connect with potential customers, and its worldwide presence can bring the value of Clever Sense to a much larger audience,” said Clever Sense co-founder and CEO Babak Pahlavan on the company’s website.

Prior to the acquisition, Clever Sense raised $1.6 million in angel funding from Bobby Yazdani, of Saba Corporation.

As exits go, this one was pretty speedy: The startup was giving sneak peeks of its still-in-beta software just 18 months ago.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquiring company, ezRez, provides SaaS products for travel companies and financial institutions to help them engage with high-value customers.

Topguest works with loyalty and rewards programs such as Hilton HHonors, Priority Club, Wyndham Rewards, United MileagePlus and Caesars Total Rewards and with social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.

Through Topguest, consumers can get real-world value out of their online activities — in simple terms, you can earn loyalty points just for your checkins, photos and updates. You can then redeem those points for more travel.

While Topguest will continue to operate under its current branding, the combined company is set up to give customers a full-fledged technology platform for loyalty programs.

“The Topguest team will relocate to ezRez’s headquarters, but the Topguest brand will continue to operate and grow on its own — although we do expect talent, ideas and service will be leveraged,” an ezRez spokesperson told VentureBeat.

In the near future, the combined companies will be rolling out a new digital wallet product. With this release, Topguest users can not only redeem their points for travel; they’ll also be able to use those points to buy real-world goods from online retailers that accept Paypal.

Topguest took a single $2 million round of institutional funding in 2010. The young company also had Peter Thiel, the “don of the Paypal mafia,” as an advisor.

All the Topguest employees will be joining the team at ezRez, itself a San Francisco-based company founded in 2003.

EU investigators have been reviewing the deal for some time, but they are suspending that review to gather more information about the proposal and determine whether or not such an acquisition would harm competition between manufacturers of Android smartphones and other devices.

“The European Commission has asked for more information, which is routine, while they review our Motorola Mobility acquisition,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. “We’re confident the Commission will conclude that this acquisition is good for competition and we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.”

The EU officials reviewing the deal had set a provisional deadline of January 10 for their decision. It is now uncertain whether that deadline will be met.

The acquisition is also being reviewed by U.S. authorities. The U.S. Department of Justice has not offered any preliminary indications of whether or not the deal passes muster.

Google first announced the deal (and its $12.5 billion price tag) back in August 2011.

While some people, including a few VentureBeat staffers, have doubted whether Google can be fair to other equipment manufacturers while maintaining ownership of Motorola, Google says the survival of Android depends on that kind of fairness.

In its arguments in favor of the merger, Google says anti-trust behaviors are impossible if the company plans to keep the Android ecosystem alive and competitive. As the deal is currently structured, Motorola Mobility would operate as a completely separate entity from Google and would only receive the same access to Android OS builds that other manufacturers, such as Samsung and HTC, currently have.

The main motivation for the acquisition is related to patents: Android and Android-using cell phone manufacturers are currently under a sustained volley of lawsuits over the operating system itself. At the start of these lawsuits, Google held fewer than 1,000 patents. For contrast, Apple, Microsoft and other companies suing Google and its partners have somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 40,000 patents each.

Motorola Mobility holds roughly 17,000 patents, many of them pertaining to very early cell phone technology. The company also has an additional 7,500 patents pending approval. Having access to such a treasure trove of legal gold would certainly help Google sustain its mobile operating system through these trying times.

Image courtesy of laihui.

Verizon is looking to launch its own streaming video offering as early as next year, according to anonymous sources close to the deal.

According to subscription-based financial reporting site dealReporter, Verizon will be teaming with Netflix rather than competing with it. While we’ve known that Verizon is interested in purchasing a pre-existing streaming media service, we had previously heard the acquisition target might be Redbox.

In response to the reports, Netflix stock has seen a marked jump, up several dollars from this morning’s $70-per-share start:

Netflix is currently dealing with a recently downgraded credit rating and paying for expensive content deals; the company without question is having cash flow issues at the moment. Verizon, however, is doing just fine.

As VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar wrote recently, “[Verizon] has several lucrative businesses, including its wireless carrier and FiOS cable TV & broadband Internet service. That means that, unlike Netflix, Verizon has plenty of money to spend on content agreements. The company can simply buy its way into the streaming video … business through content deals and acquisitions.”

Also, as Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdams stated just a few days ago, the company is scaling back its FiOS TV and Internet service to pursue wireless partnerships. In the process, the company is getting in bed with major cable providers such as Time Warner and Comcast, some of which also offer streaming media options.

It’s just a love-fest out there today, people.

And given the developer-focused products Ordered List makes (and the modern-web aesthetic of its design staff), the company seems like a pretty good fit for GitHub, a popular code-hosting and collaboration service unparalleled in popularity amongst developers, especially those of the open-source stripe.

“We’ve been fans of the team for a long time and are constantly inspired by their products, people, culture, and philosophy,” GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath writes today in a post on the company blog.

On the Ordered List blog, founder and CEO Steve Smith writes, “We truly believe that GitHub is one of the best software companies in the world. … We’ll be working solely on our products and new challenges at GitHub. Our team will stay together as a unit, continuing to build great software.”

As far as products are concerned, all Ordered List offerings will now be GitHub’s own. The lineup includes Harmony, a system for website creation and management; Speaker Deck, an app for sharing and embedding slide presentations; and Gauges, an analytics system.

New-as-of-today GitHub employees include Smith, Ruby monster John Nunemaker, Jonathan Hoyt, Brandon Keepers and Matt Graham. All of the Ordered List additions hail from and currently reside in Indiana or Michigan.

“We can’t imagine a better group of people to join forces with,” Wanstrath writes. “We’re proud to call their products our own and are incredibly excited about our future together.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

Update: Soon after this posted, Gowalla announced it is, indeed, being bought by Facebook in a blog post by chief executive Josh Williams. You can find the announcement here.

Location-based social network Gowalla‘s chief executive Josh Williams may not have given the official word that the company is being bought by Facebook, but a letter to his employees doesn’t exactly convey a red light.

Last week, an unnamed source leaked information about the deal to CNN, saying Gowalla projects are to be absorbed by Facebook and refocused on the social network’s new Timeline feature, a chronological life-view of your Facebook activity. Employees of Gowalla will also be moving from their home of Austin, Texas to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., with few remaining to work in Facebook’s remote Austin office.

At the time, the two companies declined comment. But it’s hard to stay quiet when articles, tweets and general Internet buzzing starts to happen. Williams eventually had to say something to his employees. A note that was intercepted and read to All Things D states:

Subject: Rumors and speculation

CNN just broke the news that Gowalla has been acquired by Facebook. This story was leaked from an unknown source.

The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumors and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.

But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon. Until then, I am so very grateful for what you have done to make Gowalla a success.

Given the reference to CNN’s article, the note was probably sent on Friday.

As VentureBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi points out, Facebook has often made acquisitions not necessarily for the product, but for the engineers. After Gowalla lost the location land grab to FourSquare, it turned into a travel advice site and has since been looking for the right home.

Google must get the approval of both U.S. and EU officials before the acquisition can be completed. Since the deal would put the search giant into a particularly close relationship with an Android manufacturer — one of many such OEMs — anti-trust concerns hang in the balance.

EU officials have set a provisional deadline of January 10 for their decision.

Already, Motorola Mobility shareholders have voted to go through with the deal. Around 99 percent of share holders sided in favor of the acquisition in a recent special meeting.

Google first announced it intended to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion back in August 2011. The deal was brokered largely to secure the Android operating system and ecosystem of manufacturers against patent lawsuits.

When the Android patent suits began, Google held fewer than 1,000 patents. Some of the companies suing Google and its partners held in the range of 20,000 to 40,000 patents. Motorola Mobility currently holds around 17,000 patents, with an additional 7,500 patents pending approval. Many of these patents deal with very early cell phone technologies, making Motorola Mobility the perfect pairing for Google’s Android — at least from a patent law perspective.

While some (VentureBeat staffers included) have doubted whether Google can be fair to other equipment manufacturers while maintaining ownership of Motorola, Google says the survival of Android depends on that kind of fairness.

As a result, the company doesn’t think that anti-trust behaviors will be part of its reality.

The U.S. Department of Justice is still evaluating the deal.

Image courtesy of laihui.

Android security startup Whisper Systems has been acquired by Twitter, the startup announced on its blog today.

Whisper Systems, which total employees consist of only Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, focuses on Android security for enterprise customers. As VentureBeat previously reported, the startup originally focused on creating a way for people to use Google and other systems without being tracked. The company is well-known for its RedPhone service, which creates encrypted phone calls so no one can listen into your conversation, and TextSecure, a service that also encrypts your text messages.

Since none of the Whisper Systems’ products are even out of beta, it’s likely that Twitter was more attracted to talent in this particular acquisition. The microblogging social network probably intends to improve security of its own products when used on Android and other platforms.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed by either company.

With approximately 99 percent of shares voting in favor of the deal at today’s special meeting, this acquisition now must pass U.S. government inspection.

Google announced its intention to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion back in August of this year. The proposed deal has seen its share of twists and turns.

One stipulation of the acquisition was that if the deal didn’t pass muster with regulators, Google would be required to pay Motorola Mobility $2.5 billion. This exorbitant fee indicated to some that Motorola Mobility was concerned the sale might not go through due to antitrust concerns and the distinct competitive advantages Motorola Mobility might gain if given certain privileges over other OEMs.

However, Google is very aware of the fine line it walks between a great acquisition deal with one OEM and a soured relationship with all Android OEMs. The company said it will continue to give OEMs such as HTC and Samsung early access to new Android versions on a turn-taking basis, not favoring Motorola over the OEMs it already works with.

One individual, investor John W. Keating, even went so far as to sue Google over the deal, saying, “The offered consideration does not compensate shareholders for the company’s intrinsic value and stand-alone alternatives going forward, nor does it compensate shareholders for the company’s value as a strategic asset for Google.”

One major reason for the deal is the acquisition of patents that might help Google support the Android ecosystem in the courts, where manufacturers and the OS itself are under attack from companies like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle.

When the Android patent suits began, Google held fewer than 1,000 patents altogether — a staggeringly low number compared to the 20,000 to 40,000 patents held by some of its more aggressive competitors. However, a Motorola Mobility acquisition would provide Android makers with a great deal of legal firepower: The history of cell phones is filled with Motorola firsts. As a result, the company has a rich vein of patents for Google to mine. Motorola Mobility currently holds around 17,000 patents, with an additional 7,500 patents pending approval.

“Katango was founded a little over a year ago to develop social algorithms that improve people’s online social interaction,” the startup announced on its website Thursday. “We’re excited to join the Google+ team and carry on fulfilling that mission.”

Yee Lee, Katango’s VP of product, also posted a similar update to Google+. TechCrunch was first to report the story. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is of particular interest for a few reasons, the obvious one being that Google+ is now better positioned to compete with Facebook and its Smart Lists.

But there’s more going on here, because Facebook is actually an investor in Katango. To understand what happens, you need to rewind to about a year ago.

On October 21, 2010, Facebook summoned the media to a press conference at its Palo Alto headquarters. The event introduced the world to sFund, a $250 million fund to back social innovation. The fund is managed by Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers, but Facebook said that it was contributing financing to the fund and guidance to sFund-backed startups.

The press event also heralded the arrival of CafeBots, the very first startup to receive funding — $5 million to be exact — from sFund. CafeBots remained stealthy and was later rebranded as Katango.

When Katango finally debuted in July 2011, it launched a group messaging iPhone application capable of sorting and organizing a person’s contacts by life stage or activity, and did so by hooking into the user’s Facebook address book. No surprise there, given Facebook’s investment in Katango.

Essentially, Google has acquired a startup with several direct ties to Facebook.

Could Google actually integrate Katango’s Facebook-based people-sorting algorithms into Google+? We put the question to Lee this afternoon, but he declined to comment. It strikes us as highly unlikely. Google has shown no interest in connecting its latest social networking experiment to Facebook’s populous social graph. It’s more likely that whatever algorithms Katango is using will be repurposed for Google+.

So, what will become of Katango and its technology? What does Facebook think about Google purchasing a startup it helped fund and develop? And did Facebook sign off on the deal?

All we know for certain is that Katango’s staff will join the Google+ team come Monday to work on improving Circles. Is it a win for Google? A blow to Facebook? Or just a strategic exit for Katango? Perhaps it’s all three.

In the deal, Rakuten has bought 100 percent of all issued and outstanding shares of Kobo, which makes products that compete with Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle product lines.

Around fifty-eight percent of Kobo was owned by Indigo Books & Music, a Canadian retail bookstore chain. Indigo chief executive Heather Reisman said today that the acquisition puts her company’s balance sheet in fine shape.

In a conference call to discuss the deal, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (pictured) said that while his company has created “a unique ecosystem” in Japan and internationally, “The e-commerce business is changing quite rapidly.

“We are looking for new strategies, and we started to talk with Kobo … The company is extremely entrepreneurial, fast and strong.”

“We’ve got a shared vision,” said Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis on the same call, noting that this shared vision includes Rakuten’s current users, who he called “50 million potential Kobo customers around the world.”

Rakuten, which bills itself as one of the top 3 e-commerce companies in the world by revenue, will bring Kobo “unparalleled opportunities to extend its reach through some of the world’s largest regional e-commerce companies, including Buy.com in the U.S., Tradoria in Germany, Rakuten Brazil, Rakuten Taiwan, Lekutian in China, TARAD in Thailand, and Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia, and of course, Rakuten Ichiba in Japan,” said Mikitani in a release today.

Serbinis also issued a statement, saying, “From a business and cultural perspective this is a perfect match … This transaction will greatly strengthen our position in our current markets and allow us to diversify quickly into other countries and e-commerce categories.”

Mikitani said Rakuten will be working to grow Kobo’s user base around the world as quickly as possible. Serbinis reiterated that Kobo e-readers would remain for sale in large U.S. retailers, as well, adding that the company’s market share is “over 50 percent share in Canada. Our share in the U.S. is … in the high single digits to low double digits.”

Kobo recently announced its Vox e-reader, an app-running, email-serving, web-browsing, color-displaying competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other tablet and e-reader hybrids.

Once the initial transition period has concluded, the BuyWithMe brand will be retired permanently and its customers absorbed into the Gilt fold.

Gilt City is the local, daily-deals arm of the luxe-focused Gilt Groupe. Gilt City’s areas of consumer focus include clothing for all genders and ages, interior design, travel and gourmet food and wine.

BuyWithMe recently went through a wave of layoffs that saw more than half of the company’s staff walking away with pink slips after it was unable to rustle up a new round of venture funding. Those layoffs may have happened to get BuyWithMe in better financial shape for an acquisition.

We first heard about the acquisition last week, when we reported that even more staff would likely be laid off in the acquisition process.

This was confirmed in an email with a company spokesperson today. “We will be taking on a number of staffers from BuyWithMe,” said the rep, noting that Gilt is “not disclosing the exact number of how many are joining the Gilt team,” but that number would not include the entirety of the BuyWithMe staff.

“The capital market’s willingness to invest in daily deal businesses has dried up,” said BuyWithMe COO David Wolfe in a recent conversation with VentureBeat.

“Our game plan was to raise a significant amount of capital to push this comprehensive service offering deeply into markets and, as a result, change the basis of competition in the daily deal space. We were a little late,” he concluded.

“This purchase demonstrates Gilt Groupe’s commitment to making Gilt City a top player in the local-services industry,” said Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan in a release this morning.

“BuyWithMe complements our philosophy of providing premium offers to customers at great prices. We are excited to capitalize on this incredible opportunity to grow our lifestyle positioning.”

In a statement, Gilt confirmed that BuyWithMe will conclude all its previously scheduled sales in markets that Gilt City serves. After that, BuyWithMe users will receive offers through Gilt City and Gilt Groupe.

Both companies focus on developer’s tools for cutting-edge mobile technologies. SimpleGeo is a platform for location-based mobile apps, and Urban Airship powers all kinds of mobile tricks, including in-app purchasing, push notifications and more.

“We are confirming that Urban Airship has acquired SimpleGeo in an all-stock deal,” a company spokesperson told us via email. The companies will now operate jointly under the Urban Airship name, and for current SimpleGeo customers, the SimpleGeo products will remain operational and will continue to be offered along with Urban Airship’s other technology products.

The deal was reportedly worth $3 million, a substantial discount given that SimpleGeo had raised $10 million to date. The companies did not confirm the dollar amounts.

“It was in the back of our minds when we did the partnership in July,” said Urban Airship chief executive Scott Kveton (pictured above) in a call with VentureBeat this afternoon, referring to a co-branded product roll-out the companies started working on over the summer.

“We had a really candid conversation, and the engineering teams were culturally and technically a great fit,” he said.

“As we worked together to offer integrated offerings, things got really exciting,” SimpleGeo CEO (and former Digg CEO) Jay Adelson wrote in a company blog post this afternoon. “It became clear to us that together, we could create services much, much bigger than just push notifications and location.”

The combined companies also stand to increase their market share a lot more than they could have separately.

“We’ve got over 22,000 customers on our platform, and SimpleGeo has 17,000 or 18,000,” said Kveton. “And we just have a more complete solution now.”

Kveton spoke a little bit about the company’s future plans, without giving away any major details about next week’s big product launch (stay tuned for more on that).

“Now what we’re doing is putting together a roadmap,” said the CEO. “We’re gonna be around for a long time, and we’re not gonna pull the rug out from under anybody in terms of services that are being offered … We will be making some announcements next week on the product side — very exciting stuff that our customers have been clamoring for for quite some time.”

Gilt Groupe, the luxe-themed website for upmarket flash sales, is reportedly in the final stages of buying struggling daily deals service BuyWithMe.

The latter company all too recently let the world know it was axing more than half of its staff after it was unable to raise a new round of funding. Some feel the layoffs happened to make BuyWithMe a more attractive, leaner purchase for potential buyers.

“The capital market’s willingness to invest in daily deal businesses has dried up,” said BuyWithMe COO David Wolfe in a recent conversation with VentureBeat.

“Our game plan was to raise a significant amount of capital to push this comprehensive service offering deeply into markets and, as a result, change the basis of competition in the daily deal space. We were a little late,” he concluded.

BuyWithMe was the third daily deals site in the U.S. behind heavyweight competitors Groupon and LivingSocial.

However, just a few months ago, Gilt Groupe itself was able to scrape together a respectable $138 million in funding, which left the company valued at a tidy $1 billion.

At the time of the funding, Gilt Groupe chief executive Kevin Ryan told interviewers the company expected to report $500 million in revenue for the fiscal year. He didn’t specifically mention the possibility of an initial public offering, but he did hint that the May 2011 round will likely be Gilt Groupe’s final institutional funding round.

Red Hat said it’s purchasing the privately owned Gluster to boost its cloud computing offerings — specifically, Red Hat wants to offer data storage for email and social media information to its enterprise customers.

Red Hat plans on incorporating Gluster’s products into its existing product line, which the company will eventually offer to clients through a subscription payment model, according to Red Hat.

Founded in 2005, Sunnyvale, California-based Gluster previously obtained a $8.5 million second round of funding from Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has a list of high-profile customers, including Deutsche Bank, Samsung, Autodesk and Barnes & Noble.

The acquisition deal should close later this month, according to Red Hat.

According to All Things D, the executive also stated, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo, and Yahoo is important to us… All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

Alibaba, founded in 1998, is a large, privately owned group of web-based businesses and is based in China. The group is perhaps best known for its online marketplaces for business-to-business international and domestic trade. The Alibaba group also includes retail and payment platforms, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.

All told, the Alibaba Group employs more than 22,000 people in around 70 cities and regions. It has offices around the world, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, India, the UK and the United States. Currently, Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, one part of the group.

Calling Alibaba “a crocodile in the Yangtze,” Ma said that he was interested in buying the whole of Yahoo — a complicated undertaking if ever there was one.

Yahoo was said earlier this month to be in merger or acquisition talks with Aol. Both companies have been struggling in the public eye and market. Reportedly, Aol CEO Tim Armstrong was dealing with representatives of Allen & Co., one of the firms working with Yahoo.

Yahoo’s position has been increasingly unstable since the dramatic firing of former CEO Carol Bartz, a decision that had the company’s leadership in limbo as it also searched for new advisers.

Back in August 2005, Yahoo announced an agreement to form a long-term strategic partnership with Alibaba Group in China. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo gave its Yahoo China business to Alibaba.com, and the two companies worked together to grow the Yahoo brand in China. Their goal was to create China’s largest web property.

Also, Yahoo invested $1 billion in cash to purchase Alibaba.com shares, giving Yahoo a 40 percent economic interest with 35 percent voting rights, making it the largest strategic investor in Alibaba.com.

The premium streaming video service’s owners don’t want it anymore and are trying to sell it. And while all the possible buyers (like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and DirecTV) agree that its highly valuable, it looks like none of them will end up following through with an acquisition.

The Hulu auction, which began taking its first round of bids last month, could now be completely derailed due to recent developments, reports Reuters.

Citing a person familiar with the situation, the report indicates that a Hulu sale is stalling for several reasons, including content streaming rights, the service’s sale price, potential buyers getting sidelined and Hulu’s owner’s lack of commitment to a sale.

First, the issue regarding the streaming rights and sale price go hand in hand, because the final sale will be affected by how many devices and mediums Hulu’s content is permitted to play on. And since most of the new content deals from Fox, NBC and Comcast (three of the four major owners of Hulu) all have clauses allowing them to create their own branded content services, many of the potential buyers are questioning the asking price. Initial bids have ranged from $500 million to $2 billion, according to the report.

Also, the line of potential buyers is thinning out. Yahoo, which was rumored as the strongest candidate, is now out of the running due to chaos with its leadership. The most likely buyers at this point are Google, Amazon, DirecTV and DISH Network, the report states.

Another round of Hulu bids is expected to take place next week, but the auction might not move forward if the offers aren’t high enough.

Cloud storage provider Box.net rejected a $500 million offer to purchase the company, multiple sources have confirmed to VentureBeat.

Turning down a $500 million acquisition offer isn’t necessarily a bad move for a hot company like Box.net, because it could suggest the company is desirable and attract other, richer offers.

Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie did not comment on the reports.

Box.net previously rased $48 million in its most recent round of funding led by Emergence Capital in February. It is also in the process of finalizing an extension to that round of funding worth $35 million. The company also recently opened a new office and began moving there in June after rapidly expanding its team.

“As you’ve gotten a sense in the past 7 or 8 months, the market is in nearly every variable and metric outperforming our expectations,” Levie, 26, told VentureBeat in an earlier interview. “The market for cloud adoption, our ability to hire great people and our own expectation has been above what we even anticipated a couple quarters ago.”

The most recent round authorized 4.8 million shares of series D-1 preferred stock sold at $8.03 per share, putting the company’s valuation at around $550 million, venture capital data provider VC Experts Lead Business Intelligence Analyst Justin Byers told VentureBeat. At the time the company announced its third round of funding, Levie said he intended to take the company as far as possible.

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

The deal was closed within 30 days of the Walmart team’s meeting the OneRiot folks.

“The OneRiot team will now be joining WalmartLabs, Walmart’s hub for the creation of new technologies and business models integrating social, mobile and retail for the next-generation of e-commerce,” OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs wrote to VentureBeat in an email tonight.

OneRiot’s technology will become part of WalmartLabs’ mobile and social shopping projects.

As Walmart exec (and former Kosmix founder) Anand Rajaraman wrote on the company blog, “We’re doing some amazingly interesting and impactful work at the intersection of social, mobile, and retail. The technology at the core of what we do is the Social Genome, which enables us to connect millions of consumers with the best products based on their interests at any given moment. The OneRiot technology will enrich the Social Genome, and the OneRiot team adds to the already deep expertise we have around social data analysis.”

Earlier this summer, we spoke to Peggs at length about the death of real-time search startups. At the time, Peggs said of real-time search, “It’s everywhere,” said Peggs. “But now it’s a feature of fully fledged search, rather than a standalone product, which is what users want.”

OneRiot pivoted away from search toward the end of 2010 to become a mobile-social ad network, and Peggs was optimistic about the company’s new direction.

“If you think about what we did in realtime search, we found the content that was resonating with users on the social web right now, did some sophisticated processing of that data, and surfaced up a single piece of content,” he said. “We had a terrific team and really smart technology, so we thought, ‘How can we deploy both into a new field, fast?’ Here we are, 12 months later, as the leading socially targeted mobile advertising company. It was a good decision to pivot.”

We’re happy for the OneRiot team that their startup journey ended happily in a liquidity event.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world,” wrote Marissa Mayer, VP of Local, Maps and Location Services at Google.

New York-based Zagat has provided consumer-survey-generated reviews for restaurants, bars, hotels and more for 32 years and now offers recommendations around the world. The service operates in 13 categories in more than 100 cities.

“This may be the most important announcement in our 32 years of business,” wrote Nina and Tim Zagat. “Nina and I will continue to be active in the business as co-chairs; however, the merger of our resources, expertise and platforms with those of Google will give us the opportunity to greatly expand. We have spent enough time with Google senior management to know that they fully share our belief in user-generated content, and our commitment to accuracy and fairness in providing consumers with the information necessary to make smart decisions about where to eat, travel and shop.”

The move is a major blow to user-generated reviews website Yelp, which competes with Google Places and Zagat. Google failed to acquire Yelp back in late 2009, with Yelp reportedly walking away from a $550 million deal. Google further distanced itself from Yelp when it removed Yelp’s reviews from Google Places in mid-2010.

What do you think of about the Zagat acquisition?

Google is not an active patent plaintiff, but at the same time, Google has never owned this kind of patent portfolio before.

Larry Page wrote in a blog post that “Motorola will continue to be run as a separate business.” He also stated that the “acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio.” Well, surely Larry realizes these statements are to some degree incompatible.

At a minimum, the Motorola patents help Google defend its Android investment against Apple, Nokia, Microsoft and others. But Google needs more than defensive thinking to manage the Motorola patent portfolio.

Google must put the property to “its best and highest use,” as real estate people say. This means using patents offensively, depending on Google’s needs.

Google needs a patent strategy that people at Google and Motorola can understand and execute. The plan needs a degree of simplicity for successful implementation. Using a triangle as a model, Google can create a roadmap to guide internal decisions about how and when to use its newly acquired patent portfolio.

To implement the strategy, each patent in the Motorola portfolio should be assigned to one corner of the triangle. Patents might later move around depending on licensing, but this model establishes the initial priorities.

Core to Google Business

The first priority should go to patents that support Google’s core business. That means any Motorola patents related to search and advertising go to the top. Such patents apply towards protecting Google’s major revenue source, which is advertising.

Patents in this area would not be directly shared in support of the Android community. Rather, they would used to maintain Google’s advertising revenue stream, whether that revenue stream is derived from Android devices or not. Google would use these patents offensively to protect its core business.

Grow Android Base

The second priority is to apply Motorola patents to protect and grow Android-based products. Some might argue that this helps Motorola’s competitors. More objectively, a broadly supported Android platform creates momentum and competitive excellence for Motorola as well as for other Android manufacturers.

Solid platform support for the Android community increases hardware and software interoperability, and reduces the overall cost of Android as a solution. It also helps Android compete against Apple and Microsoft, providing more lift for Motorola.

History provides a guide here. The PCI bus created by Intel allowed the PC industry to achieve a high level of hardware and software compatibility. Because of that standard, all PC vendors could pass lower costs and better quality to consumers. The resulting greater volume provided an incentive for the industry to innovate much faster.

The same idea applies to using Motorola patents to grow and improve the market for Android devices. Google would use these patents defensively — a purpose acceptable to Android partners and developers.

Differentiate Motorola

The third corner of the triangle contains patents that provide unique product differentiation for Motorola. There are many areas where Motorola can enjoy a competitive advantage.

Likewise, all major Android device makers, including Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, have created patent portfolios in support of their devices and business objectives. Having patents to support Android-based products is an absolute business necessity for these vendors. These manufacturers took to heart what former Sun CEO Scott McNealy once said, that open source is “free, like a puppy is free“.

If the patent litigation history of these vendors is any example, Motorola will cautiously use such patents both offensively and defensively. Motorola should have no problem preserving and even enhancing its product differentiation using some, instead of all, of the 17,000 patents in the portfolio.

John Koenig is the founder of Compute Media and developer of “The Patent Studio”. You can follow him on Twitter at @johnkoenig.

Larry Page photo: Jakub Mosur

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• Google buys 1,030 IBM patents, girding its loins for Android lawsuit (venturebeat.com)
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• Apple, Nokia, Qualcomm line up next big patent score: InterDigital (venturebeat.com)

Sprint currently owns the largest share of Clearwire, but the company would like to purchase shares owned by Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc. and Brighthouse Networks. Such a move would allow the carrier to have complete control over Clearwire’s WiMax network, which it currently doesn’t have despite having the majority stake in the company.

Both Sprint and Comcast are discussing a deal to provide funding to Clearwire to build out its high-speed wireless network, according to the report. Clearwire plans to spend an estimated $600 million to upgrade its network to the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which is what Verizon, AT&T and Sprint’s most recent partner LightSquared are using.

Clearwire shut down its retail business in February to focus on improving its network. However, the company has failed to make serious headway. An investment would presumably correct this situation.

The move to an LTE network is necessary for Clearwire to stay competitive, according to the company. As VentureBeat has reported in the past, Clearwire’s WiMax network is less than desirable compared to other high-speed networks.

We have reached out to Clearwire, Comcast and Sprint for comment. We will update this report with any statements we receive.