Deals

Google has acquired Sparrow, the maker of an email client available for various platforms, including Apple's iOS and Mac OS X. The news comes one week after Sparrow announced that its product is ready for Mac OS X Mountain Lion and for Apple's Retina Display technology. Financial details of the purc...

DirecTV subscribers will soon be able to get their MTV, as well as their daily fix of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, plus Nickelodeon and the 14 channels owned by Viacom, under a new agreement the two companies announced on Friday. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, it appears that Via...

Overall, the deal between Intel and ASML is pretty straightforward: Intel agreed to commit about $1.0B to ASML R&D programs to accelerate deployment of new technologies for 450mm microprocessor wafers and extreme ultraviolet lithography by as much as two years. The company also agreed to buy 10 ...

The MS part of MSNBC.com has pulled out of the joint venture. This ends the partnership between Microsoft and NBC News, which is now owned by Comcast. In 2005, Microsoft sold its stake in the MSNBC cable channel to NBC, and it now will sell its 50 percent interest in the website for an undisclosed a...

Verizon's $3.9 billion bid for spectrum from a consortium of cable providers could be in jeopardy, with news surfacing Friday of the DoJ's fear that a cross-marketing deal within the larger deal could reduce competition for landline Internet service. DoJ's concern reportedly stems from Verizon's agr...

Once-prominent social news aggregator Digg has announced its sale to Betaworks, which will fold Digg into its News.me daily briefing service. After Digg's startup launch in 2004, it quickly became one of the most popular social sites on the Web by letting users collect their own assortment of digita...

Oracle is snapping up another social media company: It announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to buy Involver, a platform provider of SML, or social markup language. SML is a developer tool used to create customized marketing applications for social media sites and Web campaigns.

Andreessen Horowitz is investing $100 million in GitHub, the San Francisco startup that provides online resources for software programmers. It's the largest investment the venture capital firm has ever made. Github's acceptance of the cash is notable. Unlike many startups, the company has been profi...

Amazon has acquired 3D-mapping startup UpNext, according to a report earlier this week. Mapping functionality has become a must-have feature for mobile device makers, but that alone may not explain what Amazon is planning for UpNext. Amazon's tablet, the Kindle Fire, does not sport a GPS radio, and ...

Dell's announcement of its planned Quest Software acquisition seemed more inevitable than surprising. Quest had been in play since March, when it said investment firm Insight Venture Partners offered $23 per share, or about $2 billion, for the company. The price jumped when an unidentified player en...

The U.S. government's push to utilize cloud-based technology will eventually lead to some blockbuster contracts -- many well over $10 million and others for even more than $100 million. Consider that just one contract in the current batch -- a cloud deal for email services at the U.S. Interior Depar...

Best Buy founder Richard Schulze is exploring a private takeover of the electronics retail chain, according to a recent report. Schulze is the largest company shareholder with about a 20 percent stake in Best Buy. He has reportedly conducted discussions with Wall Street banks to determine the best s...

Research In Motion could be looking to offload its BlackBerry handset business to survive. The company's executives are considering selling the handset-manufacturing business or even a stake in the whole company, according to numerous press reports. The company's options could include divesting the ...

Facebook recently started running ads on Zynga's website, one of several moves the social network has made recently to expand its advertising reach. Some Zynga users now see Facebook's Sponsored Stories ads, which display certain brands or businesses that those users' Facebook friends have "liked." ...

The U.S. government is determined to find new and better ways of using information technology. As part of that effort, different approaches to IT contracting are in the offing for vendors providing hardware, software, consulting and other services, including social media and mobile device solutions....