Federal antitrust regulators on Friday cleared Wells Fargo's $11.7 billion acquisition of Wachovia Corp., capping a weeklong battle for the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=Llyzm"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=Llyzm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=3yR5M"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=3yR5M" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=4C8zm"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=4C8zm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=cRaIm"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=cRaIm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=dCBFM"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=dCBFM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?a=R0uCM"img src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~f/CBSNewsMain?i=R0uCM" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsMain/~4/417440028" height="1" width="1"/

Move unites the brand as US company become wholly owned subsidiary

Approximately 60% of Arabic-speaking Internet users dislike using an Arabic keyboard, according to Yamli, a Massachusetts-based startup that launched last year. CEO Habib Haddad explains that many users have to use a Latin keyboard for their jobs or school, which makes the keyboards impractical (and many think they’re just hard to type with). When it comes time to type in Arabic, many Internet users have adopted a phonetic web language that spells out Arabic words with these Latin letters. The result, Haddad says, is messy - especially when it comes to making sounds that don’t exist in English.

Yamli has built a system that solves this problem. Users enter words phonetically into a special text box that displays a list of matching words that are written in Arabic. This allows them to keep using their Latin keyboard, without having the resulting text look like gibberish. Because there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli has to deal with multiple different phonetic spellings, which Haddad says it does with around 95% accuracy.

The company launched an Arabic frontend to Google in November 2007, and released an API in March 2008. The system was recently integrated into popular Arabic portal Maktoob (which Haddad likens to an Arab Yahoo). In the future, Haddad says that the technology will be applied to other platforms, like mobile phones. And it only has two employees, both co-founders.

The company seems like a likely acquisition target for Google or any other company looking to expand Arab-speaking nations, where Haddad says development has been relatively slow.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It may be hell out there, but Oracles chief tells shareholders the company still intends to shop for more acquisitions.

Infogrames announced today that it had completed the acquisition of Atari, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently questioned whether any potential buyer of the Nextel unit could raise the necessary capital to fund the purchase.

Earlier this morning, Rich Greenfield, the scary smart media analyst at Pali Capital, slashed his price target on News Corp to $20 from $27, citing big concerns over slowing advertising revenues for newspaper and television stations. And since this is a global problem, there is little room for News Corp to hide.

He is forecasting a 1.5 percent decline in revenues for News Corp.’s newspaper business, a 9.5 percent decline in its TV revenues and a 7.8 percent decline in revenues at its filmed entertainment division. Greenfield cut his earnings and overall revenue estimates on the media behemoth as well. The good news? Rupert Murdoch is sitting on $6 billion in cash, which means he could grow revenues through acquisitions. Cash, if not king, is indeed a king-maker.

Since he didn’t offer an analysis of the Internet part of News Corp.’s business, especially MySpace, I emailed him to find out what he thought about that. He didn’t go into much detail but he did say, “MySpace is one of their BEST-performing assets right now…MySpace is doing great.” Last year Murdoch said he expected MySpace to bring in about $750 million in revenue for its fiscal year ended in June, the lion’s share of the $1 billion in revenue forecast to come from the company’s Fox Interactive division. If the big shift from old media to online accelerates, Rupert’s kingdom does have enough assets to capitalize on that shift. But then, I wouldn’t count on any ad dollars just yet.

Photo courtesy of Pinar Ozger via Flickr.

iJournal of chromatography. B, Analytical technologies in the biomedical and life sciences, Vol. 871, No. 2. (15 August 2008), pp. 357-361./ibr /br /The potential of drift tube ion mobility (IM) spectrometry in combination with high performance liquid chromatography (LC) and mass spectrometry (MS) for the metabonomic analysis of rat urine is reported. The combined LC-IM-MS approach using quadrupole/time-of-flight mass spectrometry with electrospray ionisation, uses gas-phase analyte characterisation based on both mass-to-charge (m/z) ratio and relative gas-phase mobility (drift time) following LC separation. The technique allowed the acquisition of nested data sets, with mass spectra acquired at regular intervals (65 micros) during each IMS separation (approximately 13 ms) and several IMS spectra acquired during the elution of a single LC peak, without increasing the overall analysis time compared to LC-MS. Preliminary results indicate that spectral quality is improved when using LC-IM-MS, compared to direct injection IM-MS, for which significant ion suppression effects were observed in the electrospray ion source. The use of reversed-phase LC employing fast gradient elution reduced sample preparation to a minimum, whilst maintaining the potential for high throughput analysis. Data mining allowed information on specific analytes to be extracted from the complex metabonomic data set. LC-IM-MS based approaches may have a useful role in metabonomic analyses by introducing an additional discriminatory dimension of ion mobility (drift time).

iJournal of chromatography. B, Analytical technologies in the biomedical and life sciences, Vol. 871, No. 2. (15 August 2008), pp. 341-348./ibr /br /The application of LC-MS for untargeted urinary metabolite profiling in metabonomic research has gained much interest in recent years. However, the effects of varying sample pre-treatments and LC conditions on generic metabolite profiling have not been studied. We aimed to evaluate the effects of varying experimental conditions on data acquisition in untargeted urinary metabolite profiling using UPLC/QToF MS. In-house QC sample clustering was used to monitor the performance of the analytical platform. In terms of sample pre-treatment, results showed that untreated filtered urine yielded the highest number of features but dilution with methanol provided a more homogenous urinary metabolic profile with less variation in number of features and feature intensities. An increased cycle time with a lower flow rate (400 microl/min vs 600 microl/min) also resulted in a higher number of features with less variability. The step elution gradient yielded the highest number of features and the best chromatographic resolution among three different elution gradients tested. The maximum retention time and mass shift were only 0.03 min and 0.0015 Da respectively over 600 injections. The analytical platform also showed excellent robustness as evident by tight QC sample clustering. To conclude, we have investigated LC conditions by studying variability and repeatability of LC-MS data for untargeted urinary metabolite profiling.

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=48ef56ad14b9b90b00199a17ctxt=wwwr1.2.1.0maxX=158maxY=240" border="0" alt="begging.jpg" title="begging.jpg" width="158" height="240" /That's the logical thesis of this a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/105ff25a-9664-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1"FT story/a: Now that credit is gone and the ad market is about to fall off a cliff, the only way for most Web 2.0 companies to survive is to get Rupert Murdoch, or Les Moonves, or Barry Diller, or...emsomebody/em to buy them out, and for much less than they'd like. That sounds right to us./p pThat said... the paper's excellent Ken Li can only find one example of this actually happening, and it's related via an anonymous big media guy talking about an unnamed startup:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"One senior media executive recounts a September meeting with an entrepreneur seeking funding. Shortly after the meeting, "the CEO pulled me aside and asked 'What about an acquisition?' I said, 'Let's walk before we run.' "/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"The offering price was a fifth of the $100m valuation of a year ago. "There are bargains out there," the executive says. But for now, "we want to take a breath"./p pThe last part is most interesting to us, actually. Given that many of the Web 2.0 companies are either "pre-revenue" or have just a modest amount of Internet ad dollars to begin with, we're pretty sure that the notion of a "bargain" is going to change dramatically: Is a company that was once putatively worth $100 million now a deal at $20 million? Or is it still overpriced? It's going to be a lot harder for MA guys to justify any deals for the near future, but we think the ones they do push going forward are going to be actual businesses, with real revenues, and perhaps even profits. How many of startups meet those criteria?/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/XHz0A4dcXw5GFQYdMwkjcox-Nlg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/XHz0A4dcXw5GFQYdMwkjcox-Nlg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=9OotfmE0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=9OotfmE0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=30ql0DLc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=dDCBtkEM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=dySabYe7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=dySabYe7" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=bGkPR8ss"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=4KmtJy4x"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=jJ6jmPiI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=0L8hez53"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/klFEiMLe8TA" height="1" width="1"/

Publication Date: 2008 Oct 8 PMID: 18842888br/Authors: Nakayama, Y. - Yamagata, T. - Tanji, J. - Hoshi, E.br/Journal: J Neuroscibr/br/Before preparing to initiate a forthcoming motion, we often acquire information about the future action without specifying actual motor parameters. The information for planning an action at this conceptual level can be provided with verbal commands or nonverbal signals even before the associated motor targets are visible. Under these conditions, the information signifying a virtual action plan must be transformed to information that can be used for constructing a motor plan to initiate specific movements. To determine whether the premotor cortex is involved in this process, we examined neuronal activity in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) of monkeys performing a behavioral task designed to isolate the behavioral stages of the acquisition of information for a future action and the construction of a motor plan. We trained the animals to receive a symbolic instruction (color and shape of an instruction cue) to determine whether to select the right or left of targets to reach, despite the physical absence of targets. Subsequently, two targets appeared on a screen at different locations. The animals then determined the correct target (left or right) based on the previous instruction and prepared to initiate a reaching movement to an actual target. The experimental design dissociated the selection of the right/left at an abstract level (action plan) from the physical motor plan. Here, we show that activity of individual PMd neurons initially reflects a virtual action plan transcending motor specifics, before these neurons contribute to a transformation process that leads to activity encoding a motor plan.br/br/post to: a href = http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Fcmd%3DRetrieve%26db%3DPubMed%26dopt%3DAbstract%26list_uids%3D18842888title=Entrez+PubmedCiteULike/a

Vous n’êtes pas sans savoir que certaines équipes d’Exalead se sont installées cet été dans leurs nouveaux locaux.

Cette acquisition reflète le dynamisme et les ambitions de notre société en pleine croissance.

Les équipes Web back, Infrastructure, Tests, Professionnal Services, Direction scientifique et Administrateurs Système ont été délogées du deuxième étage…Direction 5ème ! Mais ne vous inquiétez pas, ils ne sont pas partis seuls, nous leurs avons trouvé des compagnons dignes de ce nom.

Vous allez nous demander des photos ? Eh bien on y a déjà pensé !

h4MessageLabs deal pilots security giant into cloud computing/h4 pstrongAnalysis/strong Symantec, traditionally one of the more conservative firms in the security market, is attempting to pull off a high-wire balancing act with its surprise $695m acquisition of security software-as-a-service pioneer MessageLabs. The firm is betting that increased revenues in the hottest segment of the security market will justify a high (especially for the current economic climate) acquisition price..../p

Touchées par la crise, les SSII indiennes tentent de se renforcer avec des acquisitions. C'est le cas de Tata Consulting Services.

pYahoo quickly turned around the acquisition of a web analytics firm to take on Google with "near real-time" access to raw data. Along with an upcoming developer API and an already established hosting platform, Yahoo has a shot at snagging its fair share of the market—if it acts fast./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-yahoo-web-analytics-to-finally-give-google-some-competition.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/RQ01tlRhzqcowV5SrrabgJBvKLs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/RQ01tlRhzqcowV5SrrabgJBvKLs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=n1CePs5A"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=n1CePs5A" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=zxmbR8NW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=OLiHTCSH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/FadPE8i04nk" height="1" width="1"/

pYahoo quickly turned around the acquisition of a web analytics firm to take on Google with "near real-time" access to raw data. Along with an upcoming developer API and an already established hosting platform, Yahoo has a shot at snagging its fair share of the market—if it acts fast./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-yahoo-web-analytics-to-finally-give-google-some-competition.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/RQ01tlRhzqcowV5SrrabgJBvKLs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/RQ01tlRhzqcowV5SrrabgJBvKLs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=n1CePs5A"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=n1CePs5A" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=zxmbR8NW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=OLiHTCSH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/FadPE8i04nk" height="1" width="1"/

The acquisition of Primavera Software will give Oracle the opportunity to bundle project management with its existing enterprise portfolio.

pNow that we are weeks into a financial crisis, not only are the predictions starting to surface on how technology, and specifically wireless will be affected, but actions are starting to be taken. In one of the most alarming examples, a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/10/08/sequoia-rings-the-alarm-bell-silicon-valley-in-trouble/" title="GigaOm reports today"GigaOm reports today/a, that Sequoia Capital, is telling its portfolio companies to buckle down, and illustrated the point by displaying an image of a grave stone with the message R.I.P.: Good Times. /p p We did our own homework and discovered similar sentiments in the VC community. In a discussion last week with a href="http://www.canaan.com" title="Canaan Partners"Canaan Partners/a, which was founded in 1987 and has $3 billion under management, they said they are being more disciplined and are telling their portfolio companies to tighten spending, especially when it comes to marketing budgets. When asked to compare recent events with the early 2000's, a href="http://www.canaan.com/home/team/partner/hrach-simonian/" title="Hrach Simonian"Hrach Simonian/a, an associate in Canaan's Menlo Park office, said: b"My colleagues said back then they were a little more optimistic than they are now...Back then no one expected it to happen, and now people are a little more prepared for the fact that things aren't going well./b" iDetails on wireless from Sanford C. Bernstein's Craig Moffett, and Canaan on a href="http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-tech-startups-told-to-cut-back-spending-analysts-say-downturn-will-hit/"mocoNews.net/a/i... /p p script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://s3.polldaddy.com/p/984263.js"/scriptnoscript a href ="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/984263/" How is your company reacting to the economy?/a br/ span style="font-size:9px;" (a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com" polls/a)/span/noscript br / /br br / iMore after the jump on how Canaan is dealing with today's uncertainty.../i /pp-- bHow VCs are affected:/b Often times VCs can be shielded from short-term blips because they are looking for exits over the long-term. But if IPOs and MA activity dries up, then it trickles down to investors. One of the more popular statistics being thrown around right now is that fewer start-ups have gone public this year than in any year since 1977. With IPOs out of the question, that leaves an acquisition. And, if the buyer knows the company doesn't have the chance to go public, valuations are depressed, he said. /p p -- bThe impact of banks failing:/b Simonian said the lending landscape has changed and tightened up, but venture debt, which allows companies to secure debt by leveraging a round of capital, is still available. The terms "have been quite favorable...They know that we are behind the company, so the risk is mitigated." br / br / -- bOn investing:/b "We are trying to be more disciplined. We realize that the exit markets are drying up and existing companies have to work through this storm and hang on to the cash and make it last longer. So, they are cutting their burn rate and making sure that they are spending their money wisely." /p p -- bOn cutting the burn rate:/b As with the tech bubble before, layoffs were front and center. That's not the case now, but companies are scaling back sales and marketing activities, or if a company was considering opening a new office, they might delay making the decision. But most of it is talk, not action. "I've seen some cost cutting, and I've definitely heard a lot of talk about it, but right now everyone is watching how things unfold and taking a conservative perspective." br / /p piOur mobile application for Blackberry and other Smartphones brings you the latest headlines when you're on the go. Go a href="http://m.paid.mwap.at/"here to download/a./i /p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=8L4JxE"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=8L4JxE" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=u8wSM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=u8wSM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=ALcuM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=ALcuM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=RsTBm"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=RsTBm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=b4rtM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=b4rtM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=saCmM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=saCmM" border="0"/img/a /div

Filed under: Comedy, Horror, Independent, Distribution

Like several worthwhile movie companies, Anchor Bay began by catering to the horror geeks. The company delivered fantastic DVDs of cult and classic genre flicks, and then began to branch out in all different directions. Over the past year or so, AB has dipped its toe into the theatrical pool, and now it looks like they're about to bring their cinematic output to a whole new level.

According to Variety, the "plan is to primarily acquire finished films it will roll out theatrically on fewer than 100 screens before distribbing them on other platforms like DVD, Starz's pay-TV service, the Internet, pay-per-view and video-on-demand, for example." The article goes on to mention the distributor's early forays into theatrical release -- titles like The Grand, Sex and Death 101, and Surfer, Dude -- but there's no mention of Hatchet, Spiral, and / or Behind the Mask in this story? Coulda sworn they were earlier than those other flicks.

Anyway, good luck to Anchor Bay in their ten-movie-a-year plan. Here's hoping most of their acquisitions are good ones -- and that a few slots are still dedicated to the scary stuff. (I'm betting that Rob Hall's Laid to Rest will be one of AB's early releases, and Erik says the "very funny" Bart Got a Room should also be on that list.) Glad to know that the money I spent on three different DVD versions of Evil Dead 2 is being used wisely.

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IBM is considering financial support for key IT projects it is building with partners because of the financial crisis but it has ruled out equity investments in other tech companies.

IBM has a large financial services group and it has the capital to help finance IT enterprise projects.

I recently ran into Drew Clark, head of IBM's Venture Capital Group, based in Menlo Park. "We would never make an equity investment but we are looking at financial help in projects where we partner with other companies," he said.

The IBM VC group does not invest in companies but it meets with VCs and startups to tell them about the technologies and products that it finds interesting. IBM makes several billion dollars worth of acquisitions every year but no investments are made because it doesn't want to sit on boards and manage small companies.

Mr Clark said that IBM partners with many companies in large IT enterprise projects all around the world. If its partners are struggling getting financing and that might hurt a project, IBM would step in and provide financing for the "solution."

Foremski's Take: Companies in all markets are complaining that they can't get short-term credit to cover operating costs. Although IBM's financial muscle will be welcomed in bankrolling a specific IT solution, it might not be enough. IBM might be forced to offer loans to help partner companies survive and come through the global financial crisis.

- - -

Please see: How IBM Venture Capital Group succeeds without any venture capital

pimg alt="youtube150.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/youtube150.jpg" /YouTube is not exactly known for the depth of discourse in its comments. A few days ago, Randall Munroes's popular web comic XKCD a href="http://xkcd.com/481/"suggested/a that Google should add an audio preview for all comments, so that commenters might realize how inane some of their comments really are. Now, Google has implemented exactly this feature: audio previews for YouTube comments. While the XKCD comic recommended that commenters would have to listen to a comment before posting, however, these audio previews are entirely optional. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12119amp;cb=12119' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12119amp;n=12119' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pThe audio previews are actually quite impressive and can handle even relatively complex words well (think 'autohagiography' or 'schadenfreude'). You can try it out for yourself on a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0"any YouTube video/a./p pThis is clearly a project that Google had been working on before it released this fun, but relatively useless feature on YouTube. Right now, audio previews are restricted to the first 150 characters of a comment, but we envision that Google was working on this text-to-speech project to provide screen reader functionality for tools like Google Reader or Blogger./p pimg alt="youtube_audio_comments.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/youtube_audio_comments.png" //p pIt's also notewo