Roundup: Oracle’s feast, Wired’s dig, Simulscribe and more

Here’s the latest action:

Oracle’s play in business intelligence — Oracle‘s acquisition of Santa Clara’s Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 billion, announced yesterday, gives it a leg up in the area of business intelligence. Oracle is hoping to overtake German competitor SAP. This is just the latest course of an impressive feast (30 deals, $20 billion in three years) to ge there. Jeff Nolan, a former executive at SAP, suggests Oracle’s latest move is a good one, as Hyperion is the best in the intelligence sector (Merc tries to explain the sector a bit). Business Objects and Cognos are relatively weak competitors, he says.
Mercury News story

Wired nails Digg — Wired has published a piece explaining how a reporter paid Diggers to get a pretty lame, poorly written blog post featured prominently on Digg. They did it using a service called User/Submitter. The eye-opening piece tells how the phony blog was — surprisingly — voted for even by people who weren’t paid (because those who digg early on stories that turn popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system, and so Diggers blindly digg away without taking time to read them). One commenter wondered: “How the hell did this get to the front page?” Of course, the parent of Wired, you’ll recall, is Conde Nast, which owns a competitor to Digg, called Reddit. This is particular harmful for Digg, because its management has said gaming can’t happen.

Silicon Valley start-up temperature still feverish — Last year, the new owners of the 150,000 square foot Plug&Play building in Sunnyvale complained they weren’t filling up their office space quickly enough. This week, however, we stopped by for a Stanford business plan competition cocktail event, and they said they now have a waiting list. They’re housing 90 companies. (Plug&Play doubles as an incubator for new Silicon Valley start-ups. See latest story about them here.)

Google strikes hundreds deals for Youtube — Frustrated by inability to sign deals with big publishers of video and music content, it is signing deals with hundreds of smaller ones. And not so small ones: It just signed a deal to create a news channel and two entertainment channels with BBC.

Joost, meanwhile, signs deal with Jump Media — Details here, in Time story about Joost.

Buzzy transcription services — We’re hearing folks chatting about Simulscribe, a New York company, and Spinvox, of the UK, because of the useful service they provide for busy people — transcribing voice mail and emailing it to you along with a wav file so that you can play the original voice mail if you want. The price for Simulscribe is $9.95 per month for 25 messages and then $0.25 per message after that. (Via Fred Wilson, who is the latest convert).

Omidyar and Jeff Bezos invest in O’Reilly’s new VC fund — We mentioned the new O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures venture capital fund yesterday. This document reveals that that Pierre Omidyar (of eBay fame) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are backers. (Via Valleywag)