Technology, Acquisition | featured news

Zynga is trying to provide some answers for its controversial acquisition of "Draw Something," a mobile game that was released only six weeks earlier and has since lost popularity.

Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world's No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones.

With all the talk about excessive compensation, ponzi schemes and the nasty side of Steve Jobs, it might be easy to assume that all successful CEOs are jerks.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

Facebook is spending $1 billion to buy the photo-sharing company Instagram in the social network's largest acquisition ever.

Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it agreed to buy Kiva Systems Inc for $775 million in cash, a deal that will bring more robotic technology to the e-commerce company's giant network of warehouses.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the YCombinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Well, well, well. A ‘little bird’ apparently informed Reuters reporter Felix Salmon that CNN is buying Mashable, a blog that covers social media-related news, a lot of lists about anything from the funniest cat videos of the day to the most pinteresting Pinterest pinboard of the hour and whatnot, often with the CAPS Lock key turned on for the headlines, for “upwards of $200 million”.

Groupon has acquired Hyperpublic, snapping up the two-year-old location-based technology start-up amid a growth spurt at the daily deals service.

Yahoo Inc and its Asian partners, China's Alibaba and Japan's Softbank Corp, have called off talks over a tax-free sale of the U.S. company's Asian assets, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.