purchase

Whether it's a matter of strange planetary alignments, something in the air, or our wobbly economy, it's hard to say, but in any event, these past few days haven't been great for acquisitions.  The latest one to look ill is the proposed takeover of WebMD by HLTH Corporation.

Given the hue and cry about Yahoo!'s expected layoffs and its less than perfect market performance in Q4, the word about the possible bid by Microsoft had already been in the air, which has now been translated in to a reality. Would the deal eventually materialize or not?

Want someone to take you seriously?  An effective (if inelegant) way of getting attention is to flash some cash.  That practice may also, as it turns out, get you a link from Google.

The Jux2 metasearch engine sold on eBay for $101,000 last October, and its purchaser, Doug Baker, recently posted about his acquisition.

The two developers working on JRuby, a project to enable Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine, now work for Sun Microsystems.

Rumors abound about who wants to, who can, and who will buy YouTube (assuming that it's ever offered for sale). Some of the most-mentioned names include Google, NewsCorp, and Time Warner. A GigaOM article recently presented another option - Apple - and made a convincing argument for that possibility.

A key aspect of lead generation is to engage people as early in their buying process as possible, because that's where you can make the biggest difference. Simply put, engage early and often.

The application virtualization and streaming technologies provide application compatibility and accelerate corporate desktop transitions to Windows Vista, Microsoft said of the technology available from its new acquisition, Softricity.