Cisco acquires collaboration software Maker Versly

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Cisco today announced that it has acquired San Francisco launch Versly, a privately held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all the Versly staff will be integrated into the Cisco collaboration software group (CSG) to the end of the purchase.

Versly builds plug-ins that allow groups of people to collaborate around content within Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and e-mail.

From the looks of it service remains private beta, so this is a quick way to Versly.

Here's how Murali Sitaram, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco's CSG buy resin:

"Cooperation is the main priority in Cisco. With this acquisition we are strengthening our offers of cooperation and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies in business individuals and group applications at work. "

Versly and software will be integrated into the victim as Cisco Quad, Jabber and WebEx.

According to the characteristics of their CrunchBase Versly was supported by seed funding from Accel Partners, increased, core enterprises, 500 startups and a pair of Angel investors, including Scott Dietzen, Kenny Van Zant, Jonathan Katzman and Rasool RAYANI.

The company was started by former BEA and Sun exec Benjamin Renault and former Yahoo-er Erik Eccles. The rest of the team here in detail.

Versly integrates with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, making it easy for groups to stay organized and on track is always and everywhere.

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Cisco develops and sells equipment maintenance, software, networks and communications. Products are divided into five brands: Linksys, Cisco, WebEx, IronPort and Scientific Atlanta. Cisco was founded in. ..

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ePals acquires Media personalization platform Newstogram, site news DailyMe

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

ePals, a developer of social learning network, this morning announced that it has acquired Newstogram, the creator of media personalization and content recommendation platform. Also included in the deal was news DailyMe – both businesses owned by a company called Nexify.

Transactions with ePals stock and amounted to about $ 3 million.

ePals said the acquisition provides a sound platform for personalization of media and educational applications and strengthening its capacity to match students with each other on the basis of interests, through its network of roughly 700000 classrooms and millions of users in 200 countries around the world.

The platform will enable media publishers – including more than 20 media companies currently use the Newstogram platform for the creation of a "school" pages, which underline their content.

Newstogram/DailyMe founder and CEO Eduardo Hauser becomes President ePals in the Media Division, and Chief Product Officer, Neil Budde joins on paper.

Before Nexify, Executive Vice President of AOL Latin America, and VP of news and information on Venevision Hauser. Neil Budde was previously founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal online and Vice President and editor-in-Chief, Yahoo! News, finance and sports.

ePals Director miles Gilburne is also used for the Chief at AOL, by the way. Venture capitalist, he served five years Senior Vice President of corporate development for AOL before stepping down from those duties in December 1999. He was elected to the Board of Directors of AOL in 1999, and continued to work, the Board of Directors of Time Warner until stepping down in May 2006.

ePals, issued Nexify 4, 449, 686 limited ordinary voting shares at a price of United States $ 0.67 per share. In addition, ePals Nexify issued an order to purchase additional 307.000 limited voting common shares, at the same price. Warrants are exercisable up to 4 years from the date of closing.

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Autodesk acquires DIY Instructables community

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but the most important champion of the full launch. He lives and works in Belgium, a small country in Europe. He can often be found work from their home or ... ? Read More

In its third acquisition this year, Autodesk, creator of the design, engineering and entertainment software, has acquired San Francisco Instructables, popular online community where people can upload, discuss, and collaborate on a wide range of do-it-yourself projects.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Instructables was founded by engineer, CEO Eric Wilhelm and in August 2005. You can read his story here.

Here's how Autodesk, which announced purchase of online photo editing service Pixlr and modeling software company Blue Ridge Numerics earlier this year, resins, this acquisition:

Millions of Autodesk customers worldwide are passionate about making things – whether in their professional life and personal life. Instructables will Autodesk customers thriving community of like-minded people, smart people with whom they can learn and share personal inspiration or hobby.

Instructables members benefit from Autodesk's scale and powerful design tools, will allow the community to grow and share their ideas with a wider audience.

If the DIY community, which makes the tick Instructables will be as enthusiastic about this acquisition remains to be seen. You can stay informed of the views of its members via the previous link and forum post announces the acquisition (which you can find here).

For what it's worth Autodesk intends to retain the Instructables brand and said that he would continue to operate Instructables.com while maintaining its authenticity. This is William's take on this issue:

All here at the headquarters of the Instructables is happy, because this would be awesome for the Instructables community.Instructables will still be the same site, you'll love: we'll keep the Instructables name and URL, is the whole team, our policy has not changed, you still hold the copyright to your designs, we will still run awesome competitions and robot isn't going anywhere.

However, we now will have the resources to achieve some improvements to the site I know, our authors and the community will love. Autodesk gives us the scale and support to grow and improve the Instructables, build some large applications, and our goal of creating a positive impact on the world. Each team will be Instructables Autodesk employees, but we will continue to wear our t-shirts robot with pride.

While the members of the MIT Media Lab Wilhelm and Saul Griffith founded Squid Labs, engineering and technology company specializing in design and consulting. Instructables started as an internal project of Squid Labs, and Wilhelm later spun it as an independent company.

Instructables subsequently raised funding from O'Reilly Alpha Technology Ventures and basic industries, among others, although I haven't been able to pin down as much.

Update: according to the profile last Xconomy, Instructables upgraded "just shy of 2 million.

This article also teaches us that Instructables currently boasts more than 2 million registered users and a collection of 55 000 how-to articles written by more than 20 000 participants.

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