Verisign To Acquire Moreover

Updated: read the update post here, with price, etc…

We’d been working on this story, but Tom got to it first…Moreover, the online news aggregation and business information service, is being bought out by Verisign, and the reported price is about $25 million. The sale has been in works for a long time and puts to rest all the money and management change the company has seen in about 7-8 years of its existence.

This is the second acquisition by VeriSign in the news aggregation/blog area: last week it bought out Weblogs.com for $2.3 million, and it seems logical that the two will be combined in some way.

You’ll probably find more info later on Verisign’s own blog here

For those of you who don’t really see a fit, there’s some precedent: when Verisign bought Jamba, the mobile content and ringtones company, analysts and observers didn’t know what to make of it. Now it is a big business for VRSN, even though it has seen wild ups and downs over the last year or its acquisition. It is in keeping with VeriSign’s attempts to move up the value chain from the backroom infrastructure services to leveraging the backbone to buy and develop consumer services.

Update: There’s at least a superficial connection with the Weblogs.com purchase; like some other aggregators, Moreover has its own ping service so publishers can alert the server when content on their own sites changes.

Related:

Moreover Closing Its Sale

Weblogs.com-VeriSign: Details Starting To Emerge; Price Tag $2.3 Million

Report: Winer Sells Weblogs.com To Verisign

Finding News Easy As A Snap?

Moreover’s Back With Open-Web Feeds

Moreover Revives Public Feed Service

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