acquires

Yes, that's correct. Yahoo! has acquired IndexTools and now has become a major player in the analytics space. Google Analytics and even Omniture now appear to have another direct competitor in Yahoo/IndexTools - it should be interesting to see how Yahoo will market IndexTools in the near future. Eric Peterson, has a great follow up to this story on his blog, speaking about how this acquisition will change the analytics game:

The Flashforward Conference and Film Festival is a historic event as the longest-running and largest gathering of Flash designers and developers in the world. It was developed nine years ago and has been managed by lynda.com events and Lynda Weinman since 2005.

YAHOO! MUSIC SHIFTS GEARS

Well, it was bound to happen: Google has finally made another acquisition, and this time, the lucky target was a company known as Jaiku.

Microsoft has acquired comparison shopping engine Jellyfish, and it actually looks like a cool company!

Never mind the kit: Kaboodle alone costs over $30 million.  That’s the social shopping community’s rumored price tag, anyway, following an acquisition by Hearst Corp.; Kenneth A. Bronfin, the president of Hearst Interactive Media, explained that his company thinks Kaboodle “will bring to social shopping what MySpace has brought to social media.”

iCrossing received $62 million in funding last week, and Jeffrey Herzog, the digital marketing company’s founder and CEO, said that a portion of it would go towards “strategic acquisition capital.”  Herzog wasn’t kidding - iCrossing has now bought Proxicom.

Hearst Corporation has purchased UGO Networks, an online entertainment company that targets men.