VeriSign-Moreover deal official

It’s been rumored for some time now that VeriSign was buying Moreover Technologies of San Francisco (actually two of Moreover’s founders confirmed it last week). Now it’s officially official. We just got off the phone with Moreover’s Jim Pitkow and VeriSign’s Mark McLaughlin, and an official blog post will go up here shortly.

The deal, in the works since early summer, is for $30 million in cash. McLaughlin says the deal, which comes after VeriSign’s purchase of pinging service Weblogs.com, is aimed at providing “content intelligence” for the “real-time Web.”

Moreover is steeped in Web content – aggregating it, understanding its relevancy and helping push it out to enterprises and news sites at MSN, Ask Jeeves and elsewhere. Together, McLaughlin said, the two deals are about building a robust architecture that improves the ability to aggregate and push and pull content around the Net. He said VeriSign views the architecture that underlies the real-time Web “as important as the DNS system that’s running the Internet.”