The heady days of acquisitions are back. Cisco Systems said today it is buying Norway’s Tandberg for $3 billion. That’s a huge amount of money that Cisco is laying out for a video conferencing firm.

The deal should enhance Cisco’s own TelePresence business where it sells room-sized video conferencing systems that make you feel like you’re talking to people in the same room. These systems costs hundreds of thousands of dollars each but executives feel they can use them to save on travel costs. Tandberg is one of the chief rivals in the business and it makes specialized software for managing the conferencing systems and managing the connections between them.

The deal could put pressure on Hewlett-Packard, which makes its own Halo video conferencing rooms. Tandberg’s purchase price is an 11 percent premium over its closing price on Wednesday. The company reported $809 million in revenue last year. In theory, video conferencing creates a lot of Internet traffic, which in turn helps Cisco’s core business of selling networking gear.

Cisco has bought 40 companies over the past five years, according to the New York Times. In the past week, merger mania has erupted, with Dell buying Perot Systems for $3.9 billion and Xerox buying ACS for $6.4 billion.

Register at www.GCC2000.org : with Code MW. "Young companies continue to attract investment capital if they have growth prospects," says David T. Newman, Managing Director of Newman Capital.

When it comes to free media streaming, the United States is flush with premium content from great sites like Hulu and MySpace Music. But aside from a handful of exceptions, the rest of the world is out of luck. Today, the balance changes a bit: MySpace has just launched MySpace Music in Australia and New Zealand, bringing those regions unlimited music streaming of content from all four major labels, as well as many indies.

AU/NZ users will have access to the same features as the US site, including shareable playlists, artist activity feeds, and other social functionality. But there is at least one notable difference: while MySpace Music launched in the United States with Amazon as its partner for purchasing digital downloads, the AU/NZ version has teamed with Apple’s iTunes. MySpace wouldn’t comment on whether this is foreshadowing a larger partnership, but we may well see the Apple deal extend stateside. MySpace likely had an exclusive partnership with Amazon for the US launch, but it’s been a year (which may well have been the length of the deal), so it may soon be free to explore other options.

Since launching last fall, MySpace Music has been something of a bright spot for the otherwise faltering social network. The site has seen a tenfold growth in traffic since launching, with the US portal drawing 18.95 million users (it’s also the #1 site in time spent for the all important 18-34 demographic, though some of this can be attributed to the fact that users can leave it playing in the background). MySpace Music also recently rolled out a much improved homepage.

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Apple bought its own mapping company, Placebase, in July, according to an article in Computer World. Apparently that’s part of Apple’s plan to put some distance between it and its one-time buddy, Google.

The deal wasn’t announced, evidently because the purchase price was so small that it wasn’t a financially material event for Apple. Writer Seth Weintraub figured it out because he saw that chief executive of Placebase, Jaron Waldman, is now head of the Geo Team at Apple. Placebase had mapping software that was similar to Google Maps.

Fortunately for Apple, it didn’t have to pay billions for Placebase, as Nokia did for Navteq. But Apple is smart to believe that mapping technology could be critical for its future as it offers services where location-based information is increasingly relevant. And since Google is the primary backer of the Android operating system, it’s better for Apple not to be dependent on Google Maps.

The BlackBerry TiVo app, which allows users to remotely schedule recordings of TV shows on their set-top box, is now available, reports Boy Genius .

A few weeks ago, we wrote about Swedish startup Twingly and its stealth memetracker Twingly Channels. Tonight, Twingly is launching in closed beta. In the past, Twingly has brought us a microblogging search tool, a search engine for blogs, and a global ranking system for blogs. Twingly Channels essentially lets users to create their own personalized real-time memetracker. To sign up for an invite, click here with the code “TechCrunch.”

As we wrote previously, Twingly is a mix between Digg and FriendFeed. Twingly Channels lets users to create their own personalized social memetracker by collecting feeds and search terms covering any topic or event into a channel they share with others. And the site has real-time functionality. Users can post links posted by users, content from RSS feeds, and real-time search results for terms from blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). The resulting stream is filtered into a Friendfeed-like channel where people can comment on, like, or dislike incoming items.

Channels will be public by default, but to comment or subscribe you will need to sign up. Twingly will also employ a ranking system to filter content using a proprietary alogorithm. Every item coming into the channel is continuously ranked using links from blogs, Tweets, user comments and likes. The highest ranked items are shown in the Popular view. Twingly Channels can also be used by companies for brand tracking and social media monitoring and can be kept private for these purposes.

The site could be useful for aggregating RSS feeds, tracking specific content on blogs and microblogs and then sharing that content with others, all on one site. The blog/microblog search is powered by Twingly’s search engine which tracks close to 26 million blogs around the world. It’s similar in some ways to Streamy.

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So, Justin Timberlake was supposed to be at a party tomorrow night in San Francisco. The “special, private celebration” was in honor of the company Particle (which counts Timberlake as its lead investor), which recently launched its Robo.to service. Myself and fellow writers Jason Kincaid and Paul Carr were so excited that we’ve been gossiping about it all day in back-channel conversations. I believe Paul even bought a JT book for him to sign, earlier today.  But sadly, Justin, is bailing on us.

It appears that like most celebrities, Timberlake came down with a case of the “scheduling conflict,” and had to fly back to L.A. (or stay there, not sure if he left or not) to go be a movie star. But we’ll forgive him this time because of the reason for his conflict: He needed to be on the set of The Social Network, yes, the Facebook movie.

But Paul has a brilliant back-up plan. Why doesn’t Particle get Sean Parker, the Facebook founder that Timberlake is portraying in the movie, to be Justin’s stand-in? Perfect, right? Of course, Parker may be busy, seeing as he has three or so jobs at the moment, the most recent of which is being a member of Yammer’s board.

Timberlake needs to understand that the real way to get rich — and I’m talking real rich — is to be a Silicon Valley star, not a movie star portraying a Silicon Valley star. Next time, JT, next time.

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Forbes today released their annual 400 richest Americans list — no surprise, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is on it at number 158. His net worth is $2 billion, one-fifth of Facebook’s $10 billion valuation.

At 25, Zuckerberg is by far the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list. The next youngest person on the list is hedge fund operator John Arnold, who is 35. Last year, Zuckerberg debuted on the list at #321. His net worth at the time was $1.5 billion.

Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, and now Facebook is the third largest site on the internet. In May, Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million into Facebook, setting its $10 billion valuation.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced that they now have 300 million users and cash flow positive for the first time last quarter.

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Windows 7 will come with a cool multitouch user interface, allowing you to touch the screen of your computer and perform actions with simple gestures.

But it looks like BumpTop is going to make that multitouch functionality really useful. We’ve noted before how BumpTop brings a 3-D view to your Windows desktop, making it easier to manage a big pile of files and other tasks in your inbox. Now you can use BumpTop as a multitouch user interface. This video shows how you can crop pictures, simply by tapping on them, stretching them out, and cutting off the parts you don’t want with simple hand gestures. You can do thinks like pan and zoom, using two fingers, much like you can do with the iPhone. You can spread something out or pinch to make it shrink. If you double tap on something such as a picture, it will zoom in on the object. You can shift your focus to one of the side walls in the BumpTop 3-D interface. You can pull down with two fingers on the back wall to focus on it. You can also rotate to go to the other side walls. The complete suite of multitouch gestures is included in the paid version, BumpTop Pro.

The 1.2 version of BumpTop is going to make Windows 7 machines stand out from their boring Windows Vista predecessors, and that could be good for the expected revival of PC demand coming this fall. BumpTop says that the new gestures for Windows 7 have patents pending. Some of the gestures are illustrated in the drawing. It looks like we’re not all that far away from the user interface that Tom Cruise used in the film Minority Report. Windows 7 goes on sale on Oct. 22. The company has shared 200 free codes for access to its premium BumpTop Pro version. Click here.

In case you haven’t had enough location-based news tonight, here’s another very interesting bit. It looks like Apple has very quietly bought an online mapping company, Seth Weintraub of Computerworld reports tonight.

Apple’s purchase of Placebase actually took place this past July, and a founder of a partner company that was using Placebase maps tweeted about it. But it slid under most people’s radars as that was the only news out there about it. But Weintraub dug up Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile tonight, and sure enough, he is now part of the “Geo Team” at Apple.

Here’s why this is very interesting: It could well signal yet another rift in the relationship between Google and Apple. At the very least, the fact that Apple bought a Google Maps competitor, was probably yet another reason why Eric Schmidt had to step down from Apple’s board of directors (which he did in August). But the bigger picture is that such a purchase could potentially allow Apple to move away from its dependency on Google Maps, which it uses on the iPhone and also its iPhoto computer software.

Obviously, much has been made about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app, but remember too that they also rejected (or did not approve, whatever) Google’s Latitude app, forcing Google to make a browser-based version. The reason Apple gave for not approving it was that it would confuse users with the built-in Maps application on the iPhone — the one that runs, yes Google Maps.

And Google actually helped Apple build the entire Maps application, aside from just letting them use their mapping data. So this whole episode has been bizarre, to say the least. But it may be over soon with the Placebase purchase.

Or maybe not. It is certainly possible that Apple simply realized the importance of geolocation, especially in the mobile space, and wanted to acquire talent in that field. While Placebase was a competitor to Google Maps, it also was slightly different, focusing on different layers and customizations.

[photo: flickr/Manitoba Historical Maps]

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