Microsoft announced yesterday the acquisition of Powerset, a natural language search engine. Techmeme has lots of stories about the acquisition. Today the stories are all about Microsoft/Yahoo potential deals. But lets take a step back and look at how Powerset works and why it is an important development in search. There are two key things to ...

  In my inbox today appeared SandHill's newsletter with an interesting post by Jon B. Fisher, who recently sold his startup, Bharosa, to Oracle.  Selling his startup to Oracle was his plan from Day One. He covers the considerations a startup entrepreneur needs to weigh if acquisition is the most likely exit route: how can you ...

I recently found a neat blog on the technology acquisitions for 2007. Steve Nielsen of Partner Up combed many sources to compile this comprehensive list, complete with blog, media and press coverage. Steve's Q1 2008 list is here. This list includes 3 acquisitions by Microsoft: Danger, YaData and Caligari. If you are interested in Microsoft's ...

Pageflakes, one of the companies I have had a chance to work with in the past year in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program, last week finalized its acqusition by LiveUniverse (a private company headed up by Brad Greenspan of MySpace fame). The acquisition was announced in mid-April of this year with financial details of the ...

It can be a challenge today to find a large enterprise that’s not tinkering with desktop virtualization in some way, shape or form. Marketers have been capitalizing on the virtualization hype to repackage what’s essentially an old technology as the latest and greatest route to eye-popping cost savings. Not that there isn’t an element of truth in ...

Despite energetic community efforts and the blooming of a thousand identity initiatives, the path to profits for online consumer identity services has proved remarkably elusive. Sxip Identity, one of the best-known identity startups and helmed by identerati extraordinaire Dick_Hardt of the Identity 2.0 Slideshow, has not succeeded in raising any ...

Many virtualization startups I’ve met with recently have expressed some degree of hesitation, even skepticism, about developing support for Hyper-V. I find this perplexing. First, VMware is likely to accelerate their annexation of adjacent markets currently served by their partners. This is primarily because their investors have their feet to the ...

Yet another Startup from our IDEES program to be acquired. Kynogon, an ISV specialized in “serious gaming” applications, backed by Innovacom (Fred Humbert), and Cap Decisif, has been acquired this week by Autodesk. A nice exit for two excellent VCs. Kynapse has been used to develop more than 65 AAA game titles, including Alone in the Dark 5, ...

500+ Customers, Key Strategic Partnerships, Acquisition by HP Ready to consolidate and optimize your Microsoft Windows application infrastructure? And see your configuration and management time slashed by up to 75 percent and total cost of ownership lowered by more than 50 percent? That’s what PolyServe customers are achieving with its server ...

Everyone that's talked to me in the past knows that I have wanted Microsoft to take bolder steps in moving towards the consumer mobile space. While I believe the company has developed compelling solutions targeted at the enterprise and business customers, I have always believed the action is in the consumer space. At the World Mobile Congress on ...