The new year has just begun and if 2008 is anything like 2007, we should expect a bunch of acquisitions in the tech world. As I heard someone say recently, acquisitions should be considered the lottery for geeks, except the odds of "winning" are much higher than the actual lottery. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have been swiping up start-up after
--May 2007--
May of 2007 was about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Facebook. Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates made a rare appearance together on the same stage as part of the D Conference. Their chat with Walt Mosberg and Kara Swisher was interesting to say the least, and the conversation included the mentioning of those Mac vs. PC commercials where Jobs said that the point of them was for
We know that Google likes to get their hand in just about everything and anything which is why they make so many acquisitions. Google's acquisition choice today is Jaiku, the fairly new service that competes with Twitter. An announcement on the Jaiku homepage along with an image (to the right) says it all, "Jaiku is joining Google!" With Google in
If you visit Google today, you'll notice the usual logo has been replaced with the one you see pictured to the right. It's Google's 9th Birthday, and they're celebrating! While there are actually several dates that could be considered Google's birthday, clearly they acknowledge today, September 27th as their official birthday, the day that they became incorporated and their name was
All along I had been wondering why Yahoo hadn't acquired Zoho (Online Office Suite) yet. In fact, back in July I asked this very question and I suggested that Yahoo seemed like a likely buyer because Microsoft has no need for them, and Google has their own Office Suite. Now I know that Yahoo had no need for Zoho - they were going after Zimbra, an Online Open Source Office Suite. TechCrunch
Acer, the Taiwan based computer company, has announced that they are buying Gateway! The acquisition of Gateway for $710 million will make Acer the 3rd largest PC company in the World, overtaking China’s Lenovo. Gateway, which is probably known best for their infamous cow spotted boxes, and Gateway Country retail stores (which failed), is expected to help Acer’s presence in the United States. The acquisition is scheduled to be completed
Sourcefire announced today that they acquired the open source antivirus application called ClamAV. This news conveniently comes just one week after ClamAV was ranked one of the best antivirus applications for the Linux operating system. It even beat out almost all of the commercial solutions that were available.
Here’s what Sourcefire had to say about the acquisition:
With nearly 1 million