M6 / Mistergooddeal.com

French commercial broadcaster M6 Group has indirectly bought a 95 percent stake in Mistergooddeal.com, aiming to further boost its leading position in home shopping and e-commerce activities, the company said on Tuesday.

M6's subsidiary Home Shopping Service (HSS) bought the stake in the leader in online shopping which offers discounted brand-name products. M6 said it expected to pay 44 million euros ($51.3 million) for all of Mistergooddeal.com's capital.

M6 forecasts its home shopping and e-commerce activities to yield sales exceeding 200 million euros next year.

Mistergooddeal.com is expected to make sales of 65 million euros in 2005 and has been profitable since 2003, M6 said.

(c) Reuters

News International / Propertyfinder.com

News International, part of the media group News Corp, has revealed that it has purchased Propertyfinder.com, a classified advertising website for homes, for GBP14.3m.

News Corp and its 51.5%-owned Australian subsidiary realestate.com.au purchased 95% of Asserta Holdings, the site owner, under the terms of the deal, from venture capital company Arts Alliance and minority shareholders. The company will be owned equally between News Corp and realestate.com.au, with the latter having management control.

Advertising spend has started to move onto the Internet and away from print and a number of online classified site acquisitions have been made by newspaper publishers in recent months.

(c) Internet Business News

Microsoft / FolderShare

FolderShare, a free online service provider for digital file sharing and a unit of ByteTaxi Inc, has been acquired by software giant Microsoft Corp.

FolderShare provides online accounts for users to keep files updated, and share pictures, documents and other files, synchronising them across multiple devices.

According to Microsoft, the acquisition will support the company's new 'Windows Live' plan for more software-based services over the Internet to enable customers to find information online.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the deal.

(c) Internet Business News

AOL / Musicnow

America Online Inc (AOL), an Internet Service Provider, has announced the acquisition of MusicNow LLC, a digital music subscription company.

AOL said the acquisition agreement was signed on 27 September 2005 and closed earlier this week. According to AOL, MusicNow was owned previously by Circuit City Stores Inc of Richmond, Virginia, in the US.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

(c) Telecomworldwire

Microsoft / Media-streams.com

Microsoft Corp. today announced it has agreed to acquire media-streams.com AG, a software company based in Zurich, Switzerland, that develops communications applications based on voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology. Microsoft plans to apply media-streams.com's technology, people and intellectual property to accelerate the delivery of its unified communications vision, bringing together various modes of communication (email; instant messaging; short message service; voice/telephony; and audio, video and Web conferencing), breaking down the silos of communication and extending the unified communications experience to information workers.

The technology media-streams.com has developed will help Microsoft deliver to customers an improved integrated VoIP experience based on the Microsoft(R) Office Real-Time Collaboration platform, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.

Financial details of this operation were not disclosed.

(c) PRNewswire