Technology, Acquisition | featured news

Shares of Dell rose more than 12 percent early Monday afternoon after Bloomberg News reported that the personal computer maker was in talks with at least two private equity firms about going private.

For Leo Apotheker, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, a July 2011 meeting with Autonomy founder Mike Lynch at a chic seaside resort in France was pivotal to his effort to remake a storied technology giant.

Zillow has agreed to acquire rental and real estate search startup HotPads for $16 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. The deal is the online real estate company’s first acquisition of a consumer-facing and its sixth acquisition overall in the past two years.

Hewlett-Packard Co. said that a British company it bought for $9.7 billion last year lied about its finances, resulting in a massive write-down of the value of the business. CEO Meg Whitman avoided calling it a fraud, but said Tuesday that there were "serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation PLC."

Priceline is buying Kayak in a $1.8 billion cash-and-stock deal, adding a travel search site that went public earlier this year.

Yahoo (YHOO) announced its first acquisition under CEO Marissa Mayer on Thursday, a New York-based mobile startup named Stamped that was founded by two former Google (GOOG) employees and received financing from celebrities including Justin Bieber.

The world's leading chip gear maker ASML is buying U.S. group Cymer for 1.95 billion euros ($2.5 billion) to get control of a light-based technology crucial to making the smaller, smarter chips of the future.

The New York Times Company has agreed to sell the About Group, which includes the About.com network of topic sites, to Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp for about $300 million in cash, the company said on Sunday.

The New York Times Company has a letter of intent to sell the online resource guide to Answers.com, an online question-and-answer site, for $270 million, according to an executive familiar with the negotiations.

Kevin Systrom's smartest move was to sell Instagram to Facebook early, before having to deliver even an iota of revenue. My prediction is that we’ll look back on Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as a bust—much in the same way we now view News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace, AOL’s purchase of Bebo, and Excite@Home’s purchase of Blue Mountain Arts.