Deals

Facebook on Monday announced that it will acquire Mobile Technologies, a company that specializes in speech recognition and voice technology. "It has always been our mission to make the world more open and connected," said Tom Stocky, Facebook's director of product management. "Voice technology has ...

I've been charting the evolution of the corporate app store idea in this column for more than three years. Until recently, most of the focus has been on how various service providers and other institutions can establish app stores to resell apps to their customers. Now, enlightened CIOs are discover...

News that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is acquiring The Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in the U.S., shook the publishing world on Monday. He is buying the paper for $250 million in cash. Bezos is making the acquisition as an individual -- the Post is not to be part of Amazon's vast array of pro...

Just two days after a key part of Michael Dell's last offer was roundly rejected, the attempted buyout of his company on Friday took an unexpected turn. Specifically, Dell secured a significant voting concession from the special committee set up by the board of directors in exchange for upping the t...

Following the revised buyout offer from Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake last week, a special committee of Dell's board of directors announced on Wednesday that it has rejected a key part of it. Specifically, the committee refused to accept the part of the new offer by which only shares ...

On its face, EMC's recently acquisition of ScaleIO seems pretty straightforward. The company said the deal will further strengthen its Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO's highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash card solutions, like EMC XtremSF. ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Pr...

Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake have increased their takeover bid for Dell by 10 cents to $13.75 a share, a special committee of Dell's board of directors announced on Wednesday. As a result, the already-postponed special meeting of stockholders intended for the official vote on the buy...

Verizon Wireless on Tuesday introduced a new family of Droid smartphones including the Droid Mini, Droid Ultra and Droid Maxx. All three handsets are being produced by Motorola as part of a new exclusivity deal. With this partnership, Motorola Mobility will be the only smartphone manufacturer to pro...

Over the past three-plus decades, it's hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than ne...

After months of mounting anticipation, Dell on Thursday delayed a critical vote that will decide its future. Specifically, the scheduled special meeting of stockholders -- originally intended to vote on Michael Dell's proposed buyout of the company for US$24.4 billion -- was convened and adjourned t...

Verizon may owe Apple between $12 billion and $14 billion for not selling as many iPhones as it promised to this year, according to two analyst reports revealed Thursday. Verizon committed to buy $23.5 billion worth of iPhones this year -- a number that is more than twice what it sold in 2012 -- le...

Things are looking better and better for Michael Dell's proposed $24.4 billion leveraged buyout offer for the company he founded. Following hard on the heels of repeated disapprovals of a competing offer from billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a special committee of Dell's board of directors announced...

Remember Bebo? In its heyday, five or six years ago, the social networking site showed enough promise to be considered a possible rival to then-dominant MySpace -- and to pull in an $850 million purchase price when it was acquired by AOL. What a difference a few years make. Fast forward to 2013, and...

Open cloud provider Rackspace has entered into a yearlong contributor agreement with CERN openlab whereby it will deliver a hybrid cloud solution based on OpenStack to help CERN research the origins of the universe, the company announced on Monday. CERN openlab provides a framework for testing and v...

Technology vendor partnerships come in two general flavors: 1) strategically transformative relationships that aim to develop and deliver something essentially new; and 2) tactically accretive relationships that strengthen the partners' individual efforts. The first sort typically occurs between com...