“Video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. said Monday it bought SingShot Media, an online karaoke company. Redwood City-based Electronic Arts didn’t say how much it paid for SingShot, which is based in San Francisco. SingShot lets people record themselves singing famous songs and then share those recordings with other people.”

“Yahoo Inc. plans to place display advertisements on mobile devices in 18 countries, the company said, as part of its aggressive push beyond just a search and online presence. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said it will offer its brand advertising for mobile phone users in western Europe, the Americas and South Asia, and has signed on advertisers that include Santa Clara-based Intel Corp., carmakers such as Nissan and Infiniti, and companies with interest for travelers such as Singapore Airlines and Hilton’s Embassy Suites.”

Google has been buying real estate throughout the world- usually in cool climates with cheap electricity- for planned and potential server farms. A report in the Charlotte Observer describes how Google works in conjunction with politicians and economic development officials to both persuade and cajole people into selling their homes and land.

“The big social networks are looking for ways to reach more people, and they’re having to partner. MySpace.com, the giant social network, will enter the European mobile phone market with an exclusive relationship with Vodafone, they just announced.”

“BT has agreed to terms to acquire International Network Services Inc (INS), a global provider of IT consulting and software solutions. This professional services acquisition will increase BT’s presence in North America and will significantly enhance BT’s consulting capabilities… Based in Santa Clara, California, with offices in Europe, Asia and throughout North America, the company builds, implements and secures business technology infrastructures for its customers.”

“Caritor Inc, a $100 million California-headquartered global provider of IT services with a predominant presence in India, is acquiring US-based Keane Inc for $854 million in an all cash deal. Keane is a Boston headquartered publicly listed $900 million IT and BPO service provider. The combined entity will storm into the $1 billion league employing 14,000 employees… The new entity will have Keane as its name and the company will be taken private. The chairman of Caritor, Mani Subramanian, will be the Chairman and CEO of the new firm. Subramanian was among the key senior executives of Wipro during its growth days before leaving to start Caritor in 1993. The company was started as IT Solutions, which was then re-christened Caritor during 2004.”

“Cisco Systems Inc. has agreed to acquire Five Across Inc., the company said late Thursday. San Jose-based Cisco did not disclose terms of the deal. San Francisco-based Five Across is a vendor in the social networking marketplace. Its platform, Connect Community Builder, is designed to let companies augment their Web sites with user-generated content such as audio, video, and photo sharing, blogs, podcasts and profiles. Five Across, which was founded in 2003, has 11 employees.”

“Silicon Valley continues its search for Microsoft researcher Jim Gray, who hasn’t returned from a Jan. 28 solo trip in his 40-foot sailboat off San Francisco. In the effort to find him, technologists are using the latest tools, some of which Gray himself helped develop: advanced satellite imaging, ocean drift modeling, and large database searching techniques.”

The Orange County Register has reported that Governor Schwarzenegger completely ignored the existence of a private sector database on school performance when he made the call in his state-of-the-State address for a public sector database that does exactly the same thing. Since we have not been able to learn anything about the State’s information technology plans (if any) for international business development, this report gave us pause. The state of California has an almost unbelievably bad track record in information technology projects, and some absolutely huge failures. Even though some of the same staff members were involved in some of those failures, we remained hopeful that they would consider doing things differently.