Purchasing Motorola will grant Google over 17,000 mobile patents in addition to the phone maker’s handset assets. Many had expected Google, which has historically argued against the trend of patent litigation from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, to use its newfound patent collection to defend against attacks from others.

But now that it’s more equipped to go on the patent offensive, Google is showing no signs of relaxing Motorola’s initial demands for patent royalties and harsh injunctions.

In a letter sent to the IEEE and other organizations yesterday, Google said that it endorses Motorola’s royalty demands of up to 2.25 percent for the price of entire products from Motorola and Apple, FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller reports. That’s a particularly high royalty fee, and if applied to something like a car, it would end up costing manufacturers thousands of dollars per unit. Even worse, Google is taking a hard-line approach when it comes to injunctions, which could force other companies to stop selling products that infringe on Motorola’s patents. The only way to avoid injunctions, the company says, is to accept Google’s royalty demands.

All of this is certainly a far cry from Google’s promise to adhere to “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) licensing in the very same letter.

“If they [Apple] asked for 2.25% of the price of a baseband chip, they would at least propose a reasonable royalty base and one could then talk about how many patents go into such a chip and what the relative value of their patents is,” Mueller writes. “But 2.25% of the selling price of the product as a whole is absolutely out of step with the concept of FRAND and with industry practice.”

Right now Google’s stance on patent litigation seems more than a little hypocritical, so I’m hoping the company offers up some sort of clarification soon.

“Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat in an e-mail. “Cristian and Mircea and their team of three engineers will join our Growth team and explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”

Summify’s product truncates your social media and various reader feeds into hourly newsletters showing you only the information it believes you are interested in. The company’s technology looks at who you follow, what your friends like, and where you get your news to decide what content is most compelling for your newsletters. These little bites of social information can be accessed through e-mail, your browser or your iPhone.

The product direction seems to fit well into Twitter’s overall vision. Twitter too is in the business of truncating. That is, taking what would have otherwise been 200-word posts and convincing people to state the opinion in 140 characters.

“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale,” said the team in a blog post.

But becoming part of Twitter’s “Growth team” means Summify is closing down its aggregator to focus on more tweet-friendly projects. According to Summify, subscribers believe the company “found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.” A solution Summify says it is “streamlining,” or cutting down little by little, for an easier transition into Twitter.

As of today, new registrations are being cut off, while existing Summify users will have regular access to their newsletters. Summify is also ending “public” newsletters option, as well as profile pages, influence pages, and the auto-publish feature. E-mailed summaries will be first to go in a couple weeks. Subscribers will still be able to get their social news from the website and iPhone notifications.

As a sign of a good product, customers are already beginning to complain in comments of the blog post. Many are happy for the company, but are sad to see their resource fall away. One commenter described the feeling as “shocked.”

Twitter would not comment on how the technology will be used, or if this was purely a talent acquisition.

Summify was founded in Romania and moved to Vancouver after being accepted into incubator Bootup Labs. The company employees will be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Investors include Accel Partners, Capital West Partners, co-founder of FeedBurner Steve Olechowski, and more.

In 2011, 77 game companies were acquired for at least $2.827 billion, according to research by VentureBeat and other sources. We didn’t count the numbers for last year, but IHS Screen Digest reported that game acquisitions and fundings are likely to be twice as large in dollar value in 2011 compared to 2010. This original report by GamesBeat complements our research that showed game companies raised a record $1.54 billion in 2011.

The money going into games has fundamentally shifted from the consoles to social, mobile and online gaming, as investors and game creators chase the consumers who are playing games on many different kinds of devices and are embracing new business models, such as free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay small amounts for virtual goods.

Acquisitions have heated up as the big companies scramble to gobble up more nimble startups. The war for talent has matured. Instead of fighting over employees to hire, rivals are in a battle to see who can be the first to acquire whole game studios. During 2011, Zynga bought a game studio every month, scrutinizing hundreds of companies before making a single offer. In doing so, it was capturing talent before rivals such as Electronic Arts or DeNA could buy them.

And there were more game studios to buy than ever because developers were able to create startups more easily, thanks to the ecosystem that grew up around apps on Facebook and the smartphone and tablet platforms.

Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital, summed up the changing landscape with a few observations: the rivalry between traditional console game makers like EA and new social game makers like Zynga was driving deals; China was moving to unseat America in games; and everyone was scrambling to get a piece of the emerging mobile games market. Game companies had to invest for growth or exit the market.

A number of the deals involved mobile game studios such as Rovio buying animation houses so that they could improve the animation features within their games as well as produce films for promoting the games.

Here’s a look at the biggest deals of the year, in terms of the dollar value of the transactions. Where the values of the deals were not disclosed, we simply listed them in reverse chronological order. We created this list based on our own original reporting and have linked to the relevant stories. For the deals we didn’t cover, we have linked to other publications. Beyond our own sources, we also consulted lists from the Internet DealBook and Digi-Capital. If you see some deals we missed, please say so in the comments and we’ll update the list.

1. Electronic Arts bought PopCap Games for up to $1.3 billion. July 12. EA beat out Zynga in this mega-deal, which consists of $750 million in cash and stock and a bonus of $550 million if PopCap meets performance targets. At a potential $1.3 billion in overall value, the deal far eclipses last year’s biggest deal, where Disney acquired Playdom for as much as $763.2 million.

2. Tencent bought Riot Games for nearly $400M. Feb. 4. The Chinese social networking giant bought the maker of the popular League of Legends free-to-play online battle arena game.

3. Private equity investors bought majority stake in Bigpoint for $350M. April 27. Summit Partners and TA Associates bought out the stakes of prior investors to acquire control of Bigpoint, a publisher of free-to-play online games with hundreds of millions of users.

4. Visa approved this transaction: PlaySpan for $190M. Feb. 9. The deal helped Visa move into the lucrative virtual goods payment transaction market.

5. Changyou.com acquired online game publisher 17173.com for $162.5 million in cash. Nov. 29. The deal showed that Asian game companies were also on a buying spree.

6. Japan’s Gree bought OpenFeint mobile social gaming network for $104 million. April 21. The deal helped Gree move into the worldwide mobile social game platform market.

7. In three-way transaction, Marvelous Entertainment, AQ Interactive and Liveware merged in a $89.6 million deal. May 10. Console game companies consolidated in Japan.

8. China’s Perfect World bought Atari’s Cryptic Studios for $49.8 million. May 30. The deal showed that Chinese companies are moving into the U.S.

9. Caesars Entertainment Casino Group bought 51 percent of social game developer Playtika for an estimated $40 – $50 million. May 19.

10. Autodesk bought Scaleform to expand game middleware offerings in a $36 million deal. Feb. 16.

11. Electronic Arts bought KlickNation, maker of Superhero City and other hardcore social games, for an estimated $35 million. Dec. 2.

12. Glu Mobile bought Griptonite Games for $28 million in stock. Aug. 11.

13. Korea’s Joymax bought IO Entertainment for $17.7 million. March 24.

14. Celestial Asia (CASH) bought Oberon Media Asia Pacific for $10 million. June 8.

15. DeNA bought Chilean mobile game firm Atakama Labs for estimated $6 million. Oct. 4.

16. Glu Mobile bought Blammo for $4.6 million in stock. Aug. 11.

17. QuePasa acquired Brazilian social game maker XtFT for $4 million. Feb. 1.

18. Double Fusion bought assets of in-game ad firm NeoEdge Networks. Dec. 14.

19. Red Robot Labs bought Supernomo for mobile game expansion. Dec. 9.

20. Japan’s Sega bought Three Rings for an undisclosed price. Nov. 17.

21. Ubisoft bought Finnish Xbox Live developer RedLynx for an undisclosed price. Nov. 2.

22. 6waves Lolapps bought social gaming firm Smartron5 in China for an undisclosed price. Oct. 28.

23. Microsoft bought Xbox Live game developer Twisted Pixel for an undisclosed price. Oct. 12.

24. MocoSpace bought Geocade for an undisclosed price. Oct. 3.

25. DeNA bought Vietnamese game maker Punch Entertainment for an undisclosed price. Sept. 15.

26. Virtuous, a video game maker in Shanghai, bought assets of Vietnamese animation house Sparx. Sept. 14.

27. Ngmoco bought Facebook sports game developer Lionside for an undisclosed price. Sept. 13.

28. Germany’s Bigppoint bought sports games specialist 49Games for an undisclosed price. Sept. 12.

29. BigDoor acquired small business gamification firm OneTrueFan for an undisclosed price. Sept. 7.

30. Zynga bought mobile game studio Astro Ape for an undisclosed price. Aug. 16.

31. Digital Chocolate bought game developer Sandlot Games for an undisclosed price. Aug. 16.

32. Nordic Games bought assets of JoWood and The Adventure Co. for an undisclosed price. Aug. 16.

33. Electronic Arts bought mobile game developer Bight Games for an undisclosed price. Aug. 15.

34. Intel’s Havok division bought Trinigy for an undisclosed price. Aug. 8.

35. AR Games bought a 25 percent stake in Syncopate for an undisclosed price. Aug. 8.

36. Wang Sicong bought pro-gaming team CCM for more than $6 million. Aug. 3.

37. Sony bought console video game maker Sucker Punch, creator of inFamous, for an undisclosed price. Aug. 2.

38. NCsoft bought smartphone game maker Hotdog Studio in Seoul. July 28.

39. Halfbrick bought stake in animation house The People’s Republic of Animation. July 20.

40. Live Gamer bought Brandport and GamerDNA for an undisclosed price. July 19.

41. 6waves merged with Lolapps for an undisclosed price. July 18.

42. Riptide merged with Projkt Nine to form mobile game firm. July 11.

43. Zynga bought Toronto mobile game firm Five Mobile for an undisclosed price. July 8.

Microsoft and Nokia, now close partners thanks to Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone 7, also considered a joint bid for RIM, the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s not clear if the discussions were anything more than a pipe dream, as the WSJ notes executives from all three companies often get together to discuss other partnerships.

With both Microsoft and Nokia struggling to turn the Windows Phone platform into a contender, it wouldn’t really make sense for them to snap up RIM, a former smartphone giant that’s now weighed down by an out-of-date mobile OS.

Last week, RIM’s co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, announced that the company’s long-awaited BlackBerry 10 devices won’t appear until the end of 2012 due to chipset delays. BlackBerry 10 (formerly BBX) is RIM’s next-generation OS based on the QNX software that powers the BlackBerry PlayBook. It’s RIM’s best chance to take on iOS and Android, but come the end of 2012 it may arrive too late to make a difference.

News of the delay followed RIM’s third quarter earnings report, in which the company reported a massive revenue drop over last year.

The WSJ says RIM has also discussed licensing its software with Samsung and HTC — though that’s unlikely, since those manufacturers are already juggling multiple smartphone platforms. RIM may find some success licensing its OS to smaller manufacturers, though it’s going to have a hard time competing against Android’s free price tag.

Even while the big fish is swallowing it, the medium fish is still gobbling up an even smaller fish.

Just four days after the news broke that German enterprise software giant SAP is buying SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors has a little acquisition of its own to announce: It’s buying Jobs2Web for $110 million in cash.

Jobs2Web is a site that helps companies manage their online recruiting and hiring processes. It was founded in 2003 and is based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The company states that it currently service 150 clients.

Undoubtedly the Jobs2Web purchase was underway well before the acquisition of SuccessFactors became public. Still, it’s a bit dizzying to follow the sequence of acquisitions in the enterprise cloud services space these days.

SuccessFactors, based in San Mateo, Calif., is one of the biggest success stories to come out of the market for internet-based business services. Founded in 2001 by Lars Dalgaard, SuccessFactors went public in 2007 and has made a string of acquisitions of its own over the years, including Jambok, a company that provided video education for employees; YouCalc, a business analytics software firm; and CubeTree, a social network for businesses (sort of like a Facebook for businesses).

Although it lost money in its early, pre-IPO days, the company stated that it posted 77 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the third quarter 2011 and 59 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the first nine months of 2011.

The transaction is scheduled to close by the end of this year and won’t materially affect SuccessFactors’ financials, the company said. Compared to SAP’s $3.4 billion buyout of SuccessFactors, it’s just a splash of water in a big barrel.

Photo: Bobb Klissourski/Shutterstock

The $400 million deal was under some scrutiny to determine whether or not it posed antitrust issues.

However, as the DOJ’s Antitrust Division has found nothing objectionable in the deal, the acquisition will go through as planned.

“After a thorough review of the evidence, the division concluded that the transaction is not likely to substantially lessen competition in the sale of display advertising,” a representative noted in a statement issued by the division today.

The deal had been on hold at least since June 2011, when Google first officially confirmed it had entered into a contractual agreement to acquire Admeld.

At that time, Google Vice President of Display Advertising Neal Mohan stated, “The Admeld team is an example of the huge strides the industry is making — it has quickly developed a great service that is helping many major publishers manage their ad space more efficiently and profitably.”

Specifically, the startup’s service lets publishers to grab data about advertising performance from hundreds of ad networks, ad exchanges and other sources. This data allows the publishers to determine which ads are most and least effective — an area in which Google’s own services lag despite the search giant’s best efforts.

Admeld will work with Google’s display ad network and also with the Google-owned DoubleClick’s ad exchange. However, Google has stated that Admeld will also continue to work with ad exchanges owned and run by other companies, too, including rivals Yahoo and Google.

“For now, it’s business as usual,” Mohan wrote today on the company blog.

“Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DoubleClick for Publishers and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.”

Admeld has taken a total of $30 million in funding since it raised its first round in 2008.

In a Bloomberg interview, the company’s CEO, Janet Robinson, said The New York Times Co. is particularly looking toward technology companies as it prepares for these acquisition deals.

As the parent company for a large group of print newspapers — and as a company still feeling its way to new digital revenues — it behooves the Times Co. to use acquisitions as one way to strengthen its online offerings, gain a stronger foothold in mobile and tablet form factors and improve its overall suite of digital tools.

While Robinson didn’t name specific companies The New York Times Co. might be considering, she did say, “We are in a position to invest organically or inorganically.”

That is, while Robinson expects that the Times Company is financially prepared to grow its own revenues and customer base, it is also looking externally toward mergers and acquisitions and has the capital and debt ratio to do so.

The company’s experiments with new digital revenue sources, particularly the hotly contested New York Times online paywall, have apparently paid off. “It’s working from a revenue perspective,” said Robinson.

When the Gray Lady’s paywall first launched in earnest earlier this year, VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar called it “both too expensive and too confusing to take off,” noting that initial reactions around the web about the paywall were overwhelmingly negative.

However, Robinson said the system is now working so well that the company is planning to apply the same model to other papers it owns, such as the Boston Globe, which introduced pay-to-play pricing in October this year.

In addition to the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Boston Globe, the company owns 15 daily newspapers in a range of markets and more than 50 websites, including such properties as Boston.com and About.com, which it bought in 2005 for $410 million.

The New York Times Company has not made an acquisition since 2008, when it bought a newspaper in Florida.

AT&T, not surprisingly, is none too pleased. The company objected to the release of the report, calling it merely a “draft” that doesn’t have any legal standing, reports Politico. AT&T also took issue with the fact that it didn’t get to see the report before the FCC released it to the public.

Last week, AT&T and T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom withdrew their FCC application for the merger, a move that was expected to allow the companies to focus on getting the deal approved by the US Department of Justice. It’s possible that the companies also heard murmurs of this massive FCC report and hoped that if they dismissed their application the FCC wouldn’t release it to the public.

In August, the US Department of Justice sued to block the merger, a move that was supported by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. It was at that point that AT&T likely realized its hopes were dashed for a smooth acquisition.

The FCC report takes issue with pretty much all of the benefits AT&T has claimed the merger would deliver. For example, the report found that the merger would cause significant job losses, even though AT&T said that it would create jobs. AT&T also claimed that it wouldn’t be able to build out its 4G LTE network without the acquisition, but the FCC found that the company would have had no issue achieving nationwide LTE coverage on its own.

And while AT&T has been saying for some time that the merger would lead to an increase in wireless innovation, the FCC reports that it would lead to anti-competitive effects in 99 of the biggest 100 markets in the country. The agency also didn’t buy AT&T’s claims that the merger would lower wireless prices and improve reception.

So where does this leave AT&T and Deutsche Telekom? The companies have said they will continue to pursue the merger, but it’s clearly going to be a tougher nut to crack now. AT&T is reportedly considering a deal with Leap Wireless to offload some of T-Mobile’s customers and spectrum, which could make the merger less anti-competitive in the eyes of the government.

We heard back in early October that Microsoft was eyeing Yahoo for a possible acquisition. At that time, signals were clearly mixed about the possible deal. On one hand, Yahoo would give Microsoft a highly trafficked web portal that would help it compete with content powerhouse AOL. But on the other, Microsoft investors were lukewarm on the potential of buying a property that has little growth potential.

The nondisclosure agreement with Yahoo, which was first reported by the New York Times, allows Microsoft to join private equity firms Silver Lake, TPG Capital and others to look closely at Yahoo’s financials. The report indicates Microsoft may be interested in Yahoo because it wants to preserve existing deals and potentially integrate Yahoo with Skype, the latest major Microsoft acquisition.

Microsoft already has a 10-year deal that allows its Bing strong search engine to power Yahoo’s search and to display Microsoft’s ads alongside Yahoo’s search. As part of the deal, Yahoo gets an 88 percent cut from advertising revenue, but that’s still a nice bonus for Microsoft because it gets added exposure for Bing and its ads.

Back in 2008, Microsoft famously failed to purchase Yahoo for a reported $44.6 billion. But times have changed and Yahoo’s position in the market looks a lot shakier than it did then. Yahoo recently fired CEO Carol Bartz and its latest quarterly report showed its revenues were down 24 percent from the year-before quarter.

AOL also might be looking to merge with or acquire Yahoo. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has reportedly been pitching top AOL shareholders to see whether a merger could work because it would allow each company to equal between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in cost savings.

HTC said that it will “reevaluate” the $300 million S3 purchase, Bloomberg reports — a move that makes clear what the Taiwanese phone maker’s main interest in the company was, and shows just how quickly fortunes can shift in the dirty business of patent litigation.

S3 won a patent ruling against Apple back in July, which centered on the use of image compression technology in Mac OSX. Shortly after that, HTC, which itself is in the midst of patent battles with Apple, announced its intention to purchase the company. But on Monday, the ITC reversed S3′s July ruling and dismissed the case, which means HTC can no longer be certain about the superiority of S3′s patents over Apple.

S3 could still appeal the decision, and it also has another ITC case against Apple in the works, but right now it’s clearly not a very appealing purchase for HTC.

Via The Verge

The FCC’s hearing would be yet another roadblock to the beleaguered telecom merger. On top of the Department of Justice seeking to block the deal, the attorneys general of seven states took legal steps to stop the merger back in mid-September. AT&T rival Sprint has also filed its own lawsuit.

Genachowski and his staff concluded that the merger would end up causing the telecommunications industry to be over-concentrated, and thus want a hearing that will make AT&T prove the deal is “in the public interest.” The hearing would be presided over by an administrative law judge who will weigh the evidence and render a judgement. After that, the FCC will make a final decision.

It might be tough for AT&T to prove the deal will work in the public’s favor. At present, there are four major carriers in the U.S., with Verizon at No. 1, AT&T at No. 2, Sprint at No. 3 and T-Mobile at No. 4. If AT&T and T-Mobile customers are combined, AT&T becomes No. 1, Verizon No. 2 and Sprint becomes far and away the smallest major carrier.

“The FCC’s action today is disappointing,” AT&T said in a statement. “It is yet another example of a government agency acting to prevent billions in new investment and the creation of many thousands of new jobs at a time when the U.S. economy desperately needs both. At this time, we are reviewing all options.”

Do you think the AT&T and T-Mobile merger should go through?

A handful of publications have indicated that Microsoft paid an estimated $70 million for the company, according to a report from TechCrunch Europe.

VideoSurf specializes in video search technology that scans several video related sites for results, such as DailyMotion, YouTube, Metacafe, Hulu and others. The site’s results focus on specific episodes of web shows, notable individuals and more. Admittedly, I haven’t used the site much, but I have noticed that it takes great care in separating viral/user-generated videos from the production quality videos (e.g. things from College Humor, Hulu, etc.).

It’s likely that Microsoft purchased the company with the intent of strengthening video search in its Bing search engine.

Previously, VideoSurf raised $28 million from several notable investors, including former Vice President Al Gore, Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as well as funding from Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Founded in 2006, the San Mateo, California-based startup has 35 employees.

“If we get out of the big M&A business, we have to invest in R&D,” the chief executive of HP said Monday on her first analyst conference call.

HP is still digesting its $10 billion acquisition of Autonomy, a commercial software company, which was heavily criticized because it commanded so much of HP’s market value in exchange for a gain of about a billion dollars in revenue. That’s a small amount for a company that generates $127 billion in revenue a year. That acquisition, initiated by previous CEO Leo Apotheker, has now closed.

“No large acquisitions in 2012,” Whitman said. “Nothing the size of Autonomy, and maybe more like sub-$500 million.”

She hedged that by saying, “Software may be the one area that may move in 2012, and we may want to be there.” Whitman said HP has to be sure it fills the hole and HP doesn’t pay too much for it.

“We cannot continue to rely on acquisitions alone at HP,” she said. “It’s just the wrong thing to do. We have a lot of runway with our own internal R&D capability, if we run it right.”

Whitman made the remarks as she explained why HP’s earnings expectations for next year are a lot lower than what Wall Street expected. HP is predicting $4 a share in earnings per share, compared to previous expectations of $4.56 a share. HP is no longer providing revenue guidance because HP is now managing for profitable growth, not revenues.

Whitman said she is cautious about 2012 growth because of the macroeconomic headwinds across all major regions of the world, the flooding in Thailand that will hurt PC sales for two quarters at least, and HP’s own specific issues such as higher R&D spending. She said that HP is also hiring more salespeople than it previously did.

Whitman said that HP was surprised at the weakness in the quarter for consumers buying printing supplies and printers. The disk drive shortage is helping HP in part because those who are building their own servers — Google and Facebook — are not able to do so now because they can’t get drives. They are calling HP to get servers, since HP made strategic purchases of hard drives in early October.

“I think this is going to affect the industry dramatically because it is PCs, servers, and storage,” she said.

Whitman said she was excited about Project Moonshot, a new server design that consume 89 percent less energy, 94 percent less space, and 63 percent less space.

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, challenged Whitman and said it looked like HP was losing considerable market share in various markets. Whitman said the consumer was weak all year. She said in response that HP’s problems are a third HP’s own doing. She said that some customers thought HP was getting out of PCs and so “we did ourselves in right there,” a reference to Apotheker’s plan to spin off the PC business.

“We have to get out of the news cycle and reduce the drama here,” Whitman said.

Cathie Lesjak, chief financial officer, said that HP gained share in printers, servers, and a variety of other markets. Lesjak said that the huge services group faces a big turnaround task, and that may last years rather than quarters. HP will consider letting go of low-margin services business and investing in high-margin services.

“We are making some long term bets here because we just can’t afford to run the company for the short term,” Whitman said. “We are investing for the next decade.”

The sale would comprise all the publications within ContentNext Media umbrella, which includes PaidContent.org (as well as a U.K. spin-off), MocoNews.net and India-based ContentSutra.com.

Guardian Media is reportedly seeking $15 million to $20 million for the group of publications and affiliated conferences, according to AllThingsD’s report, which cites people familiar with the sale. At that price, Guardian Media would be able to recuperate a portion of the expenses it made since purchasing the company about three years ago for $12.5 million.

The sale comes as Guardian Media looks for ways to cut costs and stay profitable. It’s certainly no secret that many large media companies have been looking for ways to shave costs in the face of a difficult digital transition.

Founded in 2002 by journalist Rafat Ali, the ContentNext’s news sites chronicle the economic evolution of digital content that is shaping the future of the media, information and entertainment industries. Ali left the company in 2010 to pursue other interests.

The sale will be split into two separate parts. Citigroup is in talks with Universal Music Group to sell EMI’s recorded-music division for $1.9 billion, while its publishing division will go to Sony Music for $2.2 billion, according to the report.

Citigroup first announced its plans to sell EMI in June after new forms of music distribution and online piracy took a considerable toll on the company’s profitability. The sale would cut the number of giant music labels from four to three: Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and Universal Music.

Although news of the sale was inevitable (Citigroup seized control of EMI from other owners in February after the company couldn’t pay its debts), it’s unfortunate that EMI will cease to exist just as the company began allowing tech companies and developers to use its music via APIs. In the past month, EMI forged partnerships with both Rumblefish and Echonest.

Rumor has it that Citigroup will announce the sale later today or this weekend. The sale is likely to face many regulatory hurdles and could take up to 20 months to get approval.

[Image above of musical group the Gorillaz, from EMI's record label]

The deal will give Best Buy full control of the mobile business, which expanded rapidly in the last few years along with the rise of consumer smartphones. The deal also ends a profit-sharing agreement with Carphone Warehouse that Best Buy made in 2008 to expand its presence in the cellphone market. However, both companies will continue to work together in expanding the business into emerging markets, such as Mexico and China.

Best Buy hopes to close the acquisition by March 2012. Money from the Best Buy Mobile sale would be returned to Carphone Warehouse shareholders.

The move comes just after Best Buy announced another large acquisition this morning: It agreed to acquire IT and cloud services provider mindSHIFT for $167 million to help extend its business further beyond retail. Also, Best Buy revealed that the company will abandon plans to expand its retail stores across Europe. Due to the European debt crisis, the company has chosen to close its 11 brick and mortar store locations in Britain, which employ over 1,000 people.

This is an important move for Best Buy because the company is slowly becoming Amazon’s showroom floor instead of being a place people purchase electronics. mindSHIFT will give Best Buy a much better opportunity to help small and mid-sized companies with IT, cloud and enterprise services and will generally allow it to further branch out, similar to Best Buy’s 2002 purchase of Geek Squad. Best Buy also has a minority stake in Rhapsody’s music streaming service after selling Napster to Rhapsody in early October.

“There’s no question that acquiring the skills, capabilities and clients of mindSHIFT has the potential to help expand Best Buy’s global services capabilities in the vast small and mid-sized business market,” said George Sherman, senior VP of Best Buy Services, in a statement. “As important, the mindSHIFT team will bring added experience, talent and resources to the remote support capability we have been building within our multi-channel tech service unit Geek Squad.”

Best Buy will start with a strong built-in base of business customers, as mindSHIFT manages data center, cloud and other services for more than 5,400 clients in the U.S. The types of businesses mindSHIFT has a proven track record with include mid-sized business, law firms, non-profits, financial services, health care and K-12 education.

mindSHIFT will continue to operate under the same name and management team. It currently has 500 employees located in offices across the U.S., including Boston, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

The acquisition is expected to close near the end of this year, pending regulatory approval.

Auditude allows its clients to manage and monetize advertising around premium video content. Its service lets publishers and media companies create high-quality advertising experiences across multiple platforms and devices. The company’s clients include Comcast, Sony Music and Universal Music Group.

“We felt that Auditude was really a market leader, not only from a technology perspective, but also in the way that they look at the market,” said Adobe Vice President and General Manager of Media Solutions Todd Teresi in an interview with VentureBeat. “Auditude is not only focused on video, but alternative devices as well … connected devices like tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles.”

“At Adobe, we really see those devices as the future of video growth and premium content,” Teresi said in response to a question about what makes Auditude stand out over other video ad platforms.

The acquisition will allow Adobe to provide a complete “end-to-end” experience, meaning its clients will be able to create, publish, monetize and optimize videos from one place. The company said it plans to integrate Auditude with its other products, such as Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Adobe Flash Media Server and Adobe Pass. The integration is tentatively scheduled to begin rolling out in early 2012, according to Teresi.

Founded in 2007, the Palo Alto-based startup previously raised a total of $38 million in funding to date from Redpoint Ventures and Greylock Partners.

BNI Video helps Internet service providers manage their video services, including entitlement, billing and quality control. As VentureBeat previously reported, BNI Video offered a good solution for older cable providers unable to keep up with the growing trend of TV moving online.

Cisco said it plans to integrate BNI Video’s technology with its Videoscape service, which will make it useful for service providers that are beginning to deliver more video over the Internet to consumers.

BNI Video is one of many companies Cisco has purchased to strengthen Videoscape. In August 2010, the network equipment company acquired online video distributor ExtendMedia to enhance its video-over-IP capabilities. And in February, Cisco purchased Inlet Technologies to boost Videoscape’s video encoding abilities.

Founded in 2009, the Boxborough, Mass.-based startup previously raised a total of $16 million in funding from Cisco Systems, Comcast Interactive Capital, Time Warner Investments, Charles River Ventures and Castile Ventures. Cisco is scheduled to close its acquisition of BNI Video in January 2012.

Sources tell Reuters that one camp in Microsoft is excited about the deal because it would give them a strong web portal and destroy AOL as a competitor. But another Microsoft group (lets call them the “realists”) say that the company shouldn’t be spending billions on a property without much growth potential.

No matter how much I think about it, I can’t imagine why Microsoft would spend billions (Yahoo has a market value of around $20 billion) on a sinking ship. Another report, from All Things Digital, says that the Reuters rumor is way off. ATD’s sources say that Microsoft has been clear it isn’t interested in buying Yahoo.

Microsoft already has a 10-year deal in place to have its Bing search engine power Yahoo’s search and to display Microsoft’s self-serve ads alongside Yahoo’s search. As part of the deal, Yahoo gets an 88 percent cut from advertising revenue — but that’s still a decent chunk of change for Microsoft, which also gets added exposure for Bing and its ads.

Microsoft famously tried, and failed, to buy Yahoo in 2008 for $44.6 billion. After that experience, I can’t imagine that Microsoft wants to go through yet another nightmare acquisition process.

Reuters notes that Microsoft may also seek out a partner for a potential Yahoo buy, but All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher squashes that idea too, saying that Microsoft has been telling Yahoo bidders it won’t be teaming up with them. Although Microsoft might consider a token investment, if it means completing the deal, Swisher says.

“Certainly, Microsoft has been and is willing to talk to anyone interested, said sources, given their Yahoo business relationship,” Swisher writes. “But this does not make it a bid of any shape or size. They are not even “considering” it, unless that means watching from a distance.”

Alibaba’s CEO recently expressed interest in buying Yahoo, but he quickly backed down when faced with the reality of a Chinese company buying a major US business, which involves deep regulatory investigations.

A well-placed source tells us that HP is currently looking to rid itself of Palm as soon as possible, and that Amazon is the closest to finalizing the deal, among a handful of contenders.

Indeed, after yesterday’s announcement of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, no other company seems as fitting a home for Palm and its webOS software. It’s worth noting that former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, who now holds a vague “product innovation” role at HP’s Personal Services Group, joined Amazon’s board late last year.

When asked for comment, an HP spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on rumors and speculation. We’re still waiting to hear back from an Amazon representative.

The Kindle Fire is powered by Android, but it’s been heavily customized by Amazon to the point where you can barely tell. By purchasing the remnants of Palm, Amazon would have free rein to redesign webOS to its own liking, and it would be able to further differentiate its Kindle devices from the slew of Android tablets in the market.

And even though HP has given up entirely on its webOS hardware business after the TouchPad tablet failed spectacularly, there’s still plenty of potential for webOS to power a successful device. Palm’s mobile software was praised for its slick multi-tasking capabilities, which could allow future Kindle Fire tablets to juggle games, movies and media with more finesse than Android.

It also appears that HP has been eyeing Amazon for some time as a potential webOS partner. In an interview with This is my next in July, Rubinstein revealed quite a bit about having Amazon use webOS in its future tablets:

So, we’d like a partner that would allow us to expand the webOS ecosystem… There’s a variety of different sets of a characteristics to qualify as a good partner. I would say Amazon would certainly make a great partner, because they have a lot of characteristics that would help them expand the webOS ecosystem. As to whether there’s been discussions or not… that’s obviously not something I’m going to comment about.

HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010, but Amazon will end up spending a fraction of that if the deal goes through. Given just how badly the TouchPad failed, HP will likely offer what’s left of Palm at a major discount, especially since Amazon woudn’t be interested in resuscitating now extinct webOS hardware.

Personally, I’ve never had much faith in HP’s ability to effectively manage Palm and webOS. Amazon, with its commitment to long-term planning and innovative consumer devices, seems like a much better fit. And in a way, it seems fitting for the company that released the first widely-available $200 tablet to snap up the company that made PDAs, the precursor to the smartphone, a phenomenon.

Update: DealBook’s Evelyn Rusli explores how Amazon may be eyeing Palm’s patents with this potential purchase.

Graphic credit: Tom Cheredar

The move is an acquihire of sorts, since Twitter has appointed Julpan founder and CEO Ori Allon as its new director of engineering. As part of the acquisition deal, Twitter will also get Julpan’s technology and its team of 12 employees, who will continue working from Julpan’s New York-based office.

Allon is well-known for his work on search algorithm Orion, which Google purchased in 2006 after outbidding both Yahoo and Microsoft. Google hired Allon to integrate his work (originally the product of his PhD efforts at the University of New South Wales) into the company’s main search algorithm, which is where he remained until leaving to found Julpan in 2010.

Not only is this a good fit for Twitter, but it will also help fill the talent-void left by departing chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, who announced his departure last week.

“Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them,” wrote Allon on Julpan’s blog. “We look forward to joining forces with Twitter’s engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan’s innovations.”

Glam Media

[Update: The deal was worth $150 million, according to Bloomberg.]

Most significantly, the addition of Ning gives Glam a reach of a reported 240 million unique viewers, which makes it second only to Facebook’s over 750 million uniques. Glam reaches people with its content, produced by authors using its platform, as well as the ads it serves on pages in its network. Many of of those pages are not directly owned by Glam, but in the parlance of the advertising industry, “reach” is everything. Being able to boast that it is the second largest in overall reach gives it significant clout in being able to purchase ads. And it can now say it is the third largest “social profile” company, after Facebook and LinkedIn.

Ning was founded in 2005 by then-CEO Gina Bianchini, with backing from Marc Andreessen and others. It now has about 100,000 social networking sites, and makes money from those sites because the owners pay Ning a subscription fee to keep those networks running. Glam is interested in Ning, because it gives Glam an established “social profile” property. Glam is seeking to build out its social profile component, but realized it was going to be difficult to build organically, because the field is moving so quickly.

We’ve confirmed from a source close to the companies that the acquisition price is nowhere near the stratospheric level of $750 million, which is what Ning was valued at in 2010 when it raised its last round, and is significantly less than even $500 million, where it was valued in 2008. Ning has raised over $100 million in funding during the course of its life.

“Ning is the clear leader for creating custom social websites and communities,” said Samir Arora, Chairman and CEO of Glam Media, in a statement. “Acquiring Ning adds a natural extension to our social media platform, new distribution channels and a talented Silicon Valley team, all of which support our aim to connect brands with engaged, passionate audiences.

“With the addition of Ning, Glam Media will truly become the first next generation media company in the post-social world,” Arora added.

Ning will operate as a new business unit within Glam Media, the two companies said in an announcement. Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s CEO, will join Glam as EVP Social Media & General Manager of Ning, and will be a member of the Glam Media executive team. Additionally, Marc Andreessen will join Glam Media’s board of directors, joining Accel’s Thereisa Ranzetta and DFJ’s Tim Draper as well as Glam co-founder Fernando Ruarte, CEO Arora and Marcel Reichart of Hubert Burda Media.

[Update: Andreessen has blogged about the merger here.]

Glam now boasts it is now the sixth largest U.S. property in display advertising by volume. Ning has about 60 million uniques a month, and 100 million registered social media profiles.

Google has been off to a somewhat slow start with its still-young Offers service, which it created after Groupon declined a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google back in late 2010. Google Offers is now live in nine U.S. cities and will be launching in more in the near future. This will mark Google’s second acquisition to help its deals presence; the first was the buyout of DealMap last month, which enabled Google to shows deals on Google Maps.

DailyDeal offers deals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so it will give Google a quick way to add customers in those countries. It launched in December 2009 as a two-person startup and has quickly grown, with a reported 252,000 coupons sold in the first quarter of this year. The Austrian version of the site has already reportedly surpassed Groupon in the country.

Google Offers and the newly acquired companies will likely get more attention with the introduction of Google Wallet, a service that is quietly launching today and should become more prominent in the coming months. Wallet is Google’s long-awaited mobile payments service that will let users pay for goods using their Android phones.

Skitch, which was originally produced by acclaimed developer company Plasq, lets you add visual annotations to photos and images. Those images can then either be saved to a computer or uploaded to the company’s online service.

“It is the app I probably use most often other than Evernote,” Libin told VentureBeat. He added that pretty much everyone in the company uses it, too. “It’s almost like we take it for granted. Skitch is such a natural… primal way to communicate.”

It currently retails for $20 in the Mac App store, but Libin said it will eventually become free and a fundamental part of Evernote going forward.

“This is going to be the best way to make Skitch as massive as we really want it to be,” said Skitch CEO Cris Pearson about the acquisition.

Libin also announced the launch of a Skitch app for Android, which is currently available for free (today only). Both iPad and iPhone versions are also in the works, with more devices planned to launch in the future.

The Mountain View, California-based company is planning to acquire additional properties in the future. Evernote recently raised $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and others for the purpose of acquisitions and expansion.

Pictured in the photo is Keith Lang, Evernote CEO Phil Libin and Skitch CEO Cris Pearson at the Evernote Trunk event.

[Photo and additional reporting by Regina Sinsky]

Bagcheck allows people to share and discuss the contents of “bags”, which contain a list of things that have something in common. So, for example, an iPad bag might include a retractable power cord, a stand and a bottle of screen cleaner solution.

It’s unclear how Twitter will use Bagcheck in the future. Yet, its likely that the acquisition is another step toward creating a homegrown advertising and promotion platform for Twitter. This is the latest in a slew of acquisitions by Twitter in the last year, which also include BackType and AdGrok.

For now the service will remain available to users but that could change, according to Bagcheck. The start up has created an instant export feature that will wrap all the “bags” made by users into a tidy set of HTML and JSON files.

The deal also states that Bagcheck’s CPO and co-founder Sam Pullara will join the Twitter engineering team. Pullara has previously worked as Yahoo’s head of product API. Fellow co-founder Luke Wroblewski, however, won’t be joining the Twitter team.

Bagcheck has previous funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Morado Ventures, Jonathan Katzman and Peter Fenton.

Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

“Data around us is exploding, the need to make sense of it is bigger than ever. You need to have an analytic product,” said Brian Gentile, chief executive of Jaspersoft.

You would think that means the funding will go toward creating a new product or enhancing its current one, right? Wrong. When asked what the plan was, Gentile replied, “We’d like to say we are doing nothing with it.” In essence, Jaspersoft is tabling the funds to be used as an “agile agent on the balance sheet”.

“The funding allows us to look beyond our roadmap and make tougher build versus buy decisions,” said Gentile. This means Jaspersoft is looking to acquire. Gentile elaborated there are four key areas Jaspersoft may buy into as opposed to create products in-house.  In priority order they are:

1)    Advanced Reporting: The ability to provide reports on a company’s operation and production data.

2)    Advanced Visualization: Supplying visual representations of data, such as a sophisticated graph form.

3)    Data Movement: Streamlining the transfer of data from its original source and formatting it to be consumed by Jaspersoft’s analytics engine.

4)    Advanced Analytics: More intelligent analysis of data using a variety of techniques such as memory and predictive analysis.

Jaspersoft has received $58 million in funding to date with Quest Software, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, and Adams Street Partners. The company is based in San Francisco and has 140 employees.

The Book Depository offers free shipping to over 100 countries and boasts a 48 hour turn around from the time you order to the time it is shipped out of their Gloucester fulfillment center. The company also owns publisher, Dodo Press, which has re-published over 15,000 hard-to-find titles for widespread distribution.

Due to The Book Depository’s already established assets and reputation, Amazon can begin benefitting from the UK company off the bat. The deal provides an opportunity for both companies to build off of each other, fulfill desires to offer the most titles in the world, and become even more internationally engrained.

“With the support of Amazon, we look forward to continuing our growth and providing an ever-improving service for readers globally,” said Andrew Crawford, founder of The Book Depository.

The Twittersphere has not been as receptive. Tweets have surfaced with concerns that The Book Depository customers can kiss their free shipping goodbye. Others are concerned about lack of competition and monopolization.

The Book Depository responded to customer unease by tweeting that it will continue to operate independently. This is similar to what online restaurant reservations website, OpenTable did with UK competitor TopTable in 2010. After purchasing TopTable, OpenTable continued the brand under it’s already trusted name. This afforded OpenTable deeper access into the European market and a base from which to expand.

Greg Greeley, Amazon’s Vice President of European Retail says, “Customers in more than 100 countries enjoy The Book Depository’s vast selection, convenient delivery and free shipping.”

Perhaps this international “base” is in mind for an Amazon that desires to grow even larger than it is and utilize the hundred-country reach that The Book Depository already has in its bookselling arsenal.

While acquisition activity among medium-sized companies is returning to near-normal levels, today’s transaction landscape has undergone epic changes. The dynamics have shifted as buyers aggressively hunt strategic acquisitions; they’re making more unsolicited offers, looking to close deals quickly, and scoping out attractive companies that can be acquired without a competitive process.

Corporate buyers, having streamlined costs and preserved profits during the downturn, are now sitting on balance sheets with ample amounts of cash. As the economic recovery continues its slow slog, growing through acquisition is often the fastest (and easiest) way to take profits to the next level. By identifying and acquiring innovative companies, strategic buyers are betting that the quicker (and ultimately less expensive) path to growth will be buying versus building.

Now that credit markets have loosened, private equity firms are roaring back into the market, anxious to put nearly $500 billion of excess capital to work. Like their corporate counterparts, private equity firms are thinking strategically by targeting specific industry sectors and players. An increasing number of firms are using partnerships with industry executives—professionals who bring hefty Rolodexes and a lot of knowledge and expertise―to source deals. And many firms are forming direct relationships with target prospects, hoping to strike deals via informal “fireside chats” rather than from a competitive auction created by an investment banker.

So what’s the problem?
Despite the swarm of buyers, owners are still reluctant to put their companies up for sale. According to a recent independent survey of 1,211 privately held businesses conducted by Pepperdine University, today’s business owners are worried about changing government regulations and taxes, economic uncertainty, and access to capital.

Concerns about lower valuations (among other things) have also kept many potential sellers on the sidelines. In fact, the Pepperdine survey reported that the top three reasons for transactions not closing were valuation gap (27.4%), lack of capital to finance the transaction (12.2%), and unreasonable seller demands (10.3%).

Those who do decide to sell are less likely to shop the company to the world, preferring instead to limit the process to one or two potential buyers. This enables them to simultaneously explore market appetite and avoid widespread negative publicity if the deal falls through.

Owners should be prepared for the preemptive offer
Most companies are not ready to be sold. Managers are too busy running the business, and getting ready requires time and money. The truth is, this process can be distracting and a drain on already overstretched resources. But the consequences of not being ready are even greater, costing time, money, and opportunity. In most cases, the investment required to get ready is insignificant compared to the loss in value you risk incurring if you’re not.

What should owners do to get ready?
Getting ready involves implementing best practice initiatives that not only improve ongoing operations but prepare the company to respond to an inquiry from a potential buyer. Critical first steps every owner should take include:

1. Create an advisory board of people who have been there before. Do not attempt to go it alone―guidance from someone who has been through the sale process is essential.
2. Obtain audited financial statements. As an investment banker, I can tell you that this is the number one due diligence issue that causes deals to crater.
3. Use free or low-cost resources to review internal practices. Check local business schools and law schools for interns who can capably review contracts and prepare financial analyses.
4. Implement internal operating best practices, such as detailed budgets, projections and comprehensive sales pipeline reports.
5. Assess your team of service providers. Lawyers, accountants, bankers, internal staff—do they have transaction experience?
6. Bring your advisors in as soon as possible. The negotiation begins as soon as a potential buyer calls.

With a market frothy with aggressive buyers, and sellers still tentative about selling, the acquisition process has moved to a buyer-initiated approach or a process that involves just a handful of potential acquirers. Owners, understanding the increased likelihood of receiving an unsolicited offer, should get prepared ahead of time. Why? Being ready allows a business owner to respond effectively, maximize valuation, and avoid a missed opportunity in this hyper-competitive deal environment.

New York-based AdMeld, which launched in 2007, provides ad optimization services for web publishers. Its tools allow publishers to pull advertising from hundreds of ad networks, ad exchanges, and other sources, which allow them to see the most and least effective performing ads.

If acquisition news is true, it may signal that Google is interested in beefing up its own ad platform services, like AdWords and Analytics.

Advertising accounts for the majority of the search engine giant’s total annual revenue –  so, any effort to improve advertising is certainly in the best interests of the company.

Obviously, Google is impressed by the efforts of AdMeld, which hired former Myspace CEO Michael Barrett in 2009.

To date, the company has raised a total of $30 million from investors, which include Norwest Venture Partners, Time Warner Investments, Spark Capital and Foundry Group.

AdMeld has yet to make an announcement regarding the deal.