Cisco / Metreos & Audium

Cisco Systems today announced it has completed the acquisition of the privately-held companies Metreos Corp. of Austin, Texas, and Audium Corp of New York, New York. Both of these companies offer easy to use, drag and drop, application creation/integration environments which will strengthen Cisco's Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA).
With these acquisitions, Cisco will help enable its ecosystem of development partners to easily create and deploy applications that integrate Cisco's Unified Communications solutions with value-added business applications. The result is more effective communications and streamlined business processes.

By acquiring Metreos and Audium and their standards-based creation and integration tools, Cisco can enable customers and partners to rapidly build customized unified communications applications that are fully integrated across the enterprise IT infrastructure, enterprise applications, and enterprise contact centers.

(c) BUSINESS WIRE

DoubleClick / Klipmart

DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital advertising technology and services, today announced that it has acquired Klipmart, the USA's largest provider of online video advertising and management solutions for web publishers, agencies, and marketers. The acquisition puts DoubleClick at the forefront of the rapidly emerging online video market and will accelerate industry innovation in digital video and emerging advertising formats.

Klipmart brings to DoubleClick a strong record of creative innovation, video service and relationships with the community of creative agencies. The combination of those assets with DoubleClick's industry-leading ad management and workflow platform for digital media creates a comprehensive rich media solution suite for video and non-video enhanced ad units. Klipmart products and technologies will remain available to all clients on both DART and non- DART platforms.

The acquisition highlights DoubleClick's commitment to providing a digital media platform integrating the management and measurement of all rich media, display and search channels. Media agencies will benefit from a combined source of technology, service and reporting through the combination of Klipmart's video and DoubleClick's DART Motif and DART ad management technologies. Creative agencies will continue to benefit from the video advertising innovation and campaign flexibility from Klipmart's full-serve customer service and quality assurance, backed by DoubleClick's operational reliability, global reach, scalability and technology infrastructure.

(c) PRNewswire

Education World / SchoolNotes

SchoolNotes has been acquired by Education World, combining two of the Web's most important education resources.

Education World, the leading free education Web site, features new, original content every weekday of the school year. Education World is a trusted provider of practical, high quality resources - virtually every one of its 60,000+ resources gives educators something they can put to immediate use in their mission to help students learn.

SchoolNotes provides easy-to-use school-to-home communications tools, enabling teachers to set up Web pages where students can get their homework and consult learning resources. SchoolNotes also offers classroom updates for parents to check on student progress. This platform is provided free for all, with advanced features available for a modest subscription fee.

(c) PRNewswire

Carlyle / Global Media

US private equity giant The Carlyle Group has acquired a significant minority stake in Munich, Germany-headquartered Global Media, an internet marketing agency. Further details regarding the size of the stake and financial details were not disclosed.

Global Media offers online services including search engine optimisation, key word advertising and online media planning. The company currently has 200 customers across Europe. These are mainly mid to large-size brands or companies including AOL, eBay and lastminute.com. Global Media has subsidiaries in the UK, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia and Korea.

The investment was made through Carlyle's European technology fund, Carlyle Europe Technology Partners. The fund is dedicated to small buy-out transactions and growth capital investments in European technology companies with an enterprise value of €25m to €250m.

(c) AltAssets