This happened earlier this week, but somehow I missed it.
Here's the deal, short and sweet from MarketWatch (who refer to it a as "good move"):
EBay Inc.'s (EBAY) planned acquisition of VeriSign Inc.'s (VRSN) payment gateway business is getting high marks from industry experts, who say that it will bolster the access that eBay's PayPal payment service has to online merchants.
The two companies late Monday announced an agreement under which the online auction company will pay $370 million in cash, stock or both for VeriSign's business that processes debit card and credit card transactions for small and midsize online merchants. The business will be part of PayPal, which will integrate it with its merchant services business. The deal is expected to close in the current quarter
So, that makes sense. PayPal and Verisign are an obvious pairing. Just struggling to see how the Weblogs.com acquisition will fit in here. As you'll recall:
.... VeriSign's purchase of Weblogs.com from founder Dave Winer is all about infrastructure and, “pings are well on their way to requiring serious infrastructure.”
But there's more to this than merely beefing up the Weblogs.com ping service, according to Netcraft.
“VeriSign is developing RSS security products for the corporate market, and Weblogs.com can be an asset in that effort,” it says.
Maybe it's because I'm sick today, but I can't wrap my brain around how all this will work under the eBay umbrella.
Feel free to comment on this. I'll be reading up and trying to make sense of this month's acquisition madness.
Forgive me for commenting on my own blog, but I had to post this.
Regarding this deal -- anything that can stop comment spam will be a blessing to the blogosphere. (Good GOD, did I really just type that?)
I just pinged via KingPing to syndicate a new post on my personal blog (on Blogger) and I had two comment spams literally WITHIN SECONDS OF POSTING.
I mean, how do they even DO that??
Posted by: Aimee | October 15, 2005 at 06:10 PM