acquisition

Last Friday, travel site Travelzoo announced that it had purchased the domain Fly.com for $1.8 million. Not a lot of details were released about the transaction, so I contacted Travelzoo to find out a bit more.  Mindy Joyce, Travelzoo's senior marketing director got back to me and answered a few questions.

Even the harshest critics of Steve Ballmer will have to admit one thing: in regards to not buying Yahoo, he's been consistent for a long time now.  At a shareholder meeting today, Ballmer said that he still has no interest in a total acquisition, and Yahoo's stock has taken a nosedive of around 20.9 percent as a result.

Like a hockey player who wasn't expecting a body check, Google's gotten an unpleasant surprise in the antitrust department.  Even as the company was focused on its deal with Yahoo, Russian authorities have stopped its acquisition of Begun.

In a move to significantly expand the reach of its network, Ask.com has just acquired the Lexico Publishing Group, owners of dictionary.com, thesaurus.com and reference.com

The Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) is trying to buy beleaguered consumer electronics retailer Circuit City (NYSE: CC), which the market is not to thrilled about: Blockbuster stock dropped precipitously in early trading while Circuit City stock jumped up.

What I like about the Seesmic's acquisition of Twhirl isn't that I'm using it as my default client for Twitter.   Or that I happen to use Seesmic and look forward to some chocolate and peanut butter goodness.

Finally Google has successfully completed the acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading Internet advertising service providers. And even EU has given a green signal to the merger and therefore from now onwards DoubleClick would be owned by Google unchallenged.

At first glance, the random acquisition of an email services company doesn't sound all that intriguing.  But Dell spent $155 million for MessageOne, so it's pretty noteworthy from a business perspective.  And to make matters even more interesting, MessageOne's cofounder is the brother of Michael Dell.