Oracle says that with Taelo, it intends to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their HR operations and employee careers.

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

“Taleo’s integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and gives companies the intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset – their people,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo. “Joining forces with Oracle gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers.”

Gregoire posted the following letter on the Taleo site:

Taleo Customers and Partners,

Michael Gregoire
Chairman and CEO

Oracle is in the process of reviewing Taleo’s product roadmap. The company says it will be providing guidance to customers.

Motorola Mobility’s hardware, by the way, isn’t limited to phones and tablets.

If a report from the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter” is accurate ,than we should be seeing the U.S. Department of Justice clearing the acquisition as early as next week.

When Google CEO Larry Page first announced the acquisition, he said that Google would run Motorola as a separate business, and that it would not affect Android as an “open platform”. Motorola would remain a licensee of the operating system.

He also brought up a previous blog post from Google about companies including Microsoft and Apple “banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android.” The Motorola acquisition, Page said, would help Google “better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

With the deal, Google is getting thousands of patents.

Interestingly enough, the same WSJ report says:

The Justice Department also is set to clear a second tech-patent deal that has raised antitrust concerns in the smartphone industry. It will allow a consortium of tech companies including Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Research In Motion Ltd. to acquire a trove of patents from bankrupt Canadian telecom-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. for $4.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said. Investigators had been looking at whether those tech companies were planning to use the patents to unfairly hobble competing smartphones using Google’s Android software.

Another fun angle to this whole story: Motorola Mobility seeks 2.25% of iPhone and iPad sales in patent royalties, and a letter from Google to IEEE President Gordon Day, indicates Google will, post-acquisition, support that as well (FOSS Patents provides the letter, via John Paczkowski)

Google’s competitors are of course hoping for antitrust regulators to step in and limit what Google is able to do with its acquisition.

However, the crew over at 9to5Google are more dedicated Google readers than I am and, from the document, tallied up that Google added 79 companies to their empire for the everyday low price of $2 billion. Some of the companies you might recognize: Motorola (this one’s still pending approval), ITA Software, AdMob, On2 Technologies, and a new office building in NYC (that’s kind of an unofficial acquisition, right?). In the document, Google claims that “These acquisitions generally enhance the breadth and depth of our expertise in engineering and other functional areas, our technologies, and our product offerings.”

The 9to5Google folks pointed out some other acquisitions that I didn’t find in the document: Zagat, DailyDeal, Dealmap, and Admeld.

With all those acquisitions happening, they’re not just gonna run themselves, are they? No, they’re not, so Google brought some more hands on deck in 2011 – over 32,000 pairs of hands, in fact, that were connected to 32,000 new employees.

And if you think this is big, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet because Google was clear about their plans for this year:

Our plans to continue to invest in systems, facilities, and infrastructure, increase our hiring, provide competitive compensation programs, and continue our current pace of acquisitions.

Place your bets now on which company will be carrying the Google banner by this time next year.

From the post:

By joining Twitter, Dasient will be able to apply its technology and team to the world’s largest real-time information network. As part of this merger, Dasient is winding down its business and is no longer able to accept new customers.

We would like to thank our customers, partners, investors, and advisers for all of their support over the years, including Google Ventures, Radar Partners, Floodgate, and Benhamou Global Ventures.

Various officials from Dasient made announcements on their personal Twitter accounts:

Twitter’s been on the move lately, earlier this month acquiring Summify after acquiring another security firm, WhisperSystems, back in November.

Mertado has posted the following message on its site:

Our mission at Mertado has always been to expose a selection of high quality, unique, lifestyle-oriented products to consumers wherever they spend their time. Working toward this goal, we have strived to create shopping experiences that build bridges between content, commerce & community.

We are extremely thankful to everyone who made Mertado possible: customers, vendors, business partners, investors, and the wonderful team!

Not much else has been disclosed about the acquisition. No word from Groupon itself so far. According to TechCrunch, which first reported the news, Mertado’s investors have included: Rustic Canyon Partners, Blumberg Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Y Combinator.

Nothing like using the new boss’ wares to show that you’re a team player. For those not in the know, Summify generates a “daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks.” Aside from the brief tweet above, an update over at Summify’s blog elaborates on their decision to “join the flock”:

Roughly 2 years ago, we moved from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, an awesome startup incubator. It has been an incredible journey, with lots of highs, a few lows, and many product iterations. In March 2011 we launched our email summary product and we’ve been blown away by the response ever since. Many of our users tell us we found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.

Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

We’d like to give a big thanks to all of our investors and advisors, especially Bootup Labs, Boris Wertz, Rob Glaser, Andrew Braccia, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Olechowski, our users, our team and, of course, the city of Vancouver. Thank you for your support and your faith in us, we couldn’t have made it so far without you!

Follow us on Twitter:
@mirceapasoi, @cgst, @mkychua, @therealnybbles, @prostul

And, a huge thanks to @robncampbell for all his work with us over the last 7 months.

Best,
The Summify Team

For those curious or concerned about how the acquisition will affect your Summification, a FAQ is also provided on the same blog post.

The solution, Symantec says, will enable organizations to “bridge the gap between business, legal and IT, reduce their risks and costs, and empower employees to work freely in a connected world.”

Customers will be able to choose between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of such a solution. The company says that through the existing integrations between LiveOffice and the recently acquired Clearwell eDiscovery Platform, customers can export info from LiveOffice to the platform where it is collected along with info from Enterprise Vault and other data sources.

Symantec says the acquisition will also lead to tighter integration between archiving and Symantec.cloud’s email security and management features.

“What were once disparate issues — information management, eDiscovery, and data security — are rapidly coming together due to the explosion of electronically stored information and the on-premise and cloud-based technologies that deliver and disseminate it. Organizations are increasingly demanding that these issues be addressed in a unified way through information governance,” stated Brian Dye, VP, Information Intelligence Group at Symantec. “As a market leader for storage, eDiscovery and security, Symantec continues to enhance its offerings and deepen its commitment to provide the most comprehensive intelligent information governance solutions.”

The acquisition closed on Jan. 13.

SAP aims to use the acquisition to bolster its education-related offerings.

“The workforce performance tools market has become increasingly strategic and critical to our customers’ success, and datango is a proven leader in this space,” said Markus Schwarz, SVP and global head of SAP Education. “By having its own product in this market, SAP can now deliver and accelerate innovations and produce robust content for our customers in the future.”

In an overview of the deal (pdf), datango says:

Certain datango employees related to this business are expected to join SAP following the completion of the transaction. datango will retain employees related to its KPS business (acquired from Enlight AB in 2007) and additional employees required to support and service existing client and partner agreements for the datango performance suite solution. The acquisition follows a successful partnership between datango and SAP in support of SAP’s Business ByDesign product.

Until closing, the datango business remains unchanged and continues as usual. You should expect to receive the same level of professional, courteous and knowledgeable assistance as you have always received from datango.

The deal, while subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close by the end of the quarter. Terms were not disclosed.

“The acquisition of Efficient Frontier adds cross-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite, along with a social marketing engagement platform and social ad buying capabilities,” an Adobe spokesperson said in an email to WebProNews.

“With the completion of the Efficient Frontier acquisition, we are focused on aggressively integrating cross-channel ad buying and optimization capabilities with our Digital Marketing Suite,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Marketing, Adobe. “Enterprises and agencies that count on Adobe to optimize digital business will benefit from exciting advancements in our ability to help them better turn ad spend, social media initiatives and campaigns into real business impact.”

Details of the product-integration roadmap will be shared at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 March 20-23 in Salt Lake City.

The acquisition was about $400 million, and Adobe expects it to bring in $60-80 million this year.

“We’ve added a critical piece to our puzzle with the acquisition of Toolbox.com,” said Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah. “The IT community relies on itself to make decisions and be informed. Owning the leading professional networking site is a significant strategic advantage for Ziff Davis.”

Toolbox.com will become part of Ziff Davis’ B2B Focus, which was formed when the company acquired Focus Research.

This makes the fourth acquisition for Ziff Davis in the past year.

Toolbox.com has 2.3 million registered members.

Ziff Davis sites already reach 40 million per month. Properties include: PCMag, BuyerBase, LogicBuy, Geek.com, ExtremeTech, AppScout and B2B Focus.