Twitter has reportedly turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook on 24th Nov 2008. Twitter executives believed it was worth taking a shot at creating their own revenue-generating system before giving up the company to acquisitions. And, BoomTown’s sources say that the $500 million offer, which was an all-stock form, was seen as being “inflated,” since Facebook’s actual valuation is said to be close to $5 billion.

Image Courtesy : Trevor Mauch

Secure Computing will be helping McAfee in the sector of corporate defence against malware. Currently Secure Computing contains 22,000 customers in 106 countries.

The purchase agreement requires CareerBuilder to pay MSN up to $443 million over seven years, based on the traffic that MSN delivers. In another separate agreement, MSN announced that they have extended their agreement with CareerBuilder to be the exclusive content provider for their MSN Careers channel in the United States through 2013.

CareerBuilder began building a more aggressive presence in international markets in 2006 by launching sites in the UK, Canada and India. It bought job sites in Sweden and the Netherlands in April.

Google Inc. has signed a letter of intent with Kevin Rose to purchase the social news site Digg.com for around $200 million, tech blog TechCrunch reported.

In contrast to Google News, where the stories are selected by computer algorithm, Digg’s news stories are submitted by users and ranked according to user approval ratings. It is known that Google was interested in using Digg’s technology to help improve its search results by having users vote on their quality.

Digg was formed in 2004 by young entrepreneur Kevin Rose who used a programmer he found online for $10 an hour. It is known that he paid $1,200 dollars for the domain name digg.com and $100 a month for hosting it, which is now ranked as one of the 100 most trafficked sites on the Internet by Alexa.

Digg has so far raised around $11.3 million in VC. Most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three-year ad deal with Google rival Microsoft, which may be terminated on a sale to Google, TechCrunch said. Ouch !

“An immediate task we’ll undertake over the next few weeks is matching and aligning DoubleClick employees with our organizational plan for the business,” Google said in a blog post.

“As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the US and possibly in other regions as well,” the company said. DoubleClick has 1,500 employees. Outside of the United States, Google will begin consultations with employee organizations on potential job reductions in line with local laws, it said.

On Tuesday, February 26, Sun announced it completed the acquisition of MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database

The billion dollar acquisition makes it the largest open source software deal ever and makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL  Perl/Python/PHP) open source software stack!

“We can afford to make big investments in the engineering and marketing that needs to get done. We will do that with or without Yahoo,” said Gates in an interview with Reuters.

The two companies are at a stand-off in Microsoft’s $41.7 billion unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo. Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $31 a share in cash and stock, a bid which Yahoo’s board rejected, saying it undervalued the company.Microsoft countered by saying its offer was “full and fair,” but did not say what it planned to do next. Analysts expect Microsoft to sweeten its bid, possibly to $35 a share, to clinch a deal.

Although Take-Two [GTA publisher] has rejected the cash offer, EA has decided to keep the offer open. The offer is a 63% stake on Take-Two’s closing price over the previous 30 days, and a 64% premium over Take-Two’s closing price on 15th February, the last trading day before EA sent its revised proposal to Take-Two.

EA sent a letter of proposal to Take-Two on 19th February, which has been rejected by the board of directors and executive chairman Strauss Zelnick.

“Take-Two’s game designers would also benefit from EA’s financial resources, stable, game-focused management team, and strong global publishing capabilities.”

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“Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners,” Redmond’s press statement said today. Warning regulators that “if we don’t buy it, then Google will” is an interesting legal strategy, but is unlikely to win much support from competition regulators.

Steve Ballmer says that he sees the online advertising market doubling to $80 billion in two years, and he’d like a slice of that sweet, creamy pie. The less he has to share with Google, the better. Yahoo’s $7 billion in 2007 sales looks huge next to Microsoft’s online division producing $1.5 billion—but it’s less than half of Google’s $15 billion revenue take. If Yahoo! and Microsoft merge, their combined online ad operation still wouldn’t match the one headquartered in Mountain View. Google controls 60 per cent of the search market, and DoubleClick, which Google will buy as soon as regulators let it, is by far the dominant player in the display ad market.

If Yahoo! approves the proposed $44.6bn deal, the two regulators will sit down at the bargaining table to determine which one is better equipped to review it. Given Yahoo!’s recent performance – with both profits and share price on the slide – it seems a fair bet that plenty of shareholders will be tempted by Microsoft’s offer.