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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

For a brand manager, fussing over the features of a bunch of mobile apps is a distraction from the much larger mission of getting consumers to install the brand on their phones.

Building a custom app to stand out in Apple’s 85,000-app store, or the growing app collections for every other phone, is too hard. And what about all the other not-a-huge-hit phones? Are you going to support them, too?  GetJar, the cross-platform mobile app library that’s been around since 2005, has a solution. They’ve developed an App Download Page that the company describes as “a new service for mobile developers and content owners seeking to provide a simple experience for their users to download the right mobile app for their phone, independent of device platform, model or carrier.”

Let me simplify that: GetJar can park a logo on the home screen of just about any phone made.

The trick is that GetJar’s apps, like Yahoo’s OneSearch tool for my BlackBerry, pop open the customer’s browser. Installing a working web link with a logo is easy. As a brand manager, you throw it back on the tech guys to figure out how to make the Web destination for your brand logo something interesting that leads the user to bond with the brand.

Facebook has a GetJar-powered App Download Page that puts Facebook on phones that aren’t the high-powered smartphones Americans love. It works on the Nokia 5300, as shown at right.

Photobucket has announced in that they’re going to use GetJar this fall, too.

This is boring stuff for techies — oooh, a link to HTML, zzzz — but I’m pretty stoked about the idea that VentureBeat fans can just put a VentureBeat logo on their non-Apple phone screen and not need to know how it works, not need to install complicated software with bugs, and would probably be delighted that, duh, it’s just a link to our website. We — I mean the VentureBeat reporting staff — haven’t pressed for a mobile branding presence, because we’re afraid of the business development meetings. We’re hoping it’ll just show up.

The question for both brand managers and software developers is, does a browser-based app now do everything you need? At VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference in July, GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs very much disagreed with Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra, although the two didn’t argue in person. Apps will be as big as the Internet, Laurs told attendees. No, everything will be delivered through a browser, Gundotra told attendees.

The App Download Page gives the impression the browser is coming up from behind. As a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the company’s extensive application catalog, the new Web-based tool lets GetJar have it both ways.

It has been a rough three months for startups hoping to get acquired. Well, it’s been more like a rough year, but there’s new data from Dow Jones VentureSource focusing on the third quarter of 2009.

Overall, venture-backed liquidity (the combination of mergers, acquisitions, and initial public offerings) added up to $2.7 billion, down 49 percent from the same period last year, VentureSource says. It’s even a drop from the $3 billion of venture liquidity earned in Q2.

Things were even worse for M&As, which fell 56 percent to $2.25 billion paid in 71 deals — though the number would have been higher if VentureSource had counted Amazon’s $807 million purchase of Zappos, which hasn’t closed yet. Instead, that should add a big boost to next quarter’s numbers.

Acquired companies also made less money (median acquisition price fell 52 percent to $22 million) and had been waiting for longer to sell (median age increased 23 percent to 6.13 years).

On the other hand, IPOs were actually up from last year, with a combined total $451.25 million, the highest since 2007. That’s less exciting than it sounds, since the vast majority of that money came from battery company’s A123’s spectacular IPO, and there were only two IPOs in all. So it’s hard to see the increase as indicative of any big trend, except the fact that big IPOs are still possible. But hey, after the yearlong period (which ended in Q2) of no IPOs , that’s something.

[photo:flickr/andrewk100]

I noticed something interesting tonight. In the new build of Tweetie 2 (not out yet), a bunch of little red location markers started appearing next to tweets in my stream. Knowing that this new version was built using Twitter’s new Geolocation APIs, I inquired if this mean they had been turned on. Sure enough, they have, developer Loren Brichter just confirmed after talking to Twitter.

But there’s a slight problem. Apparently, the reason these geotags are showing up for all tweets (even those not actually geotagged) is that the documentation was a little unclear of how to handle non-geotagged tweets, Brichter says. The result is that every single tweet is tagged with a location somewhere just off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana. Either this is Atlantis, the Island from Lost, or we have a problem. [Update on the location below]

Brichter is aware of the issue and has already resolved it, and has resubmitted Tweetie 2 to the App Store for approval. Since no one officially has Tweetie 2 yet, this probably doesn’t affect you at all. But you have to wonder if other Twitter app developers were confused by this as well. If so, we could see a lot of apps with some wonky geolocation data.

Twitter hasn’t yet responded to my request for more information. It’s not clear if they meant to turn this on tonight. We do know that they had originally planned to launch it last week at the Twitter Conference in LA, but it wasn’t quite ready yet.

Earlier today, Twitter announced the new Lists feature, which will also feature an API. And of course, everyone is waiting for the Retweet API as well.

Update: As our apparently geography major readers have informed me, the area just off the coast of Ghana is lat/long 0,0. This makes sense — there is no location data attached to these tweets, so apparently they default to 0,0.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors