If content is king, VeriSign must be royally happy with its $30 million cash acquisition of Moreover Technologies today.
The purchase pairs giant infrastructure services company VeriSign , with Web content aggregator Moreover. Currently, Moreover aggregates more than 12,000 news sources and millions of blogs. Moreover uses an advanced content tagging system with more than 30 metadata tags and 380 categories to deliver hundreds of thousands of unduplicated real-time content articles daily from across 126 countries in 25 languages. VeriSign operates the Internet registry for .com and .net domains; provides payment security services for e-commerce transactions; is building the infrastructure for a network to transmit product information via electronic product codes; and monitors and secures IP data and voice traffic.
Earlier this month, VeriSign bought Weblogs.com. The first ping server, Weblogs.com accepts notifications when new content is posted in the RSS
After this deal, Moreover’s new content aggregation services will utilize VeriSign’s ping server infrastructure to increase the reliability and intelligence of its content
distribution network. Moreover technology already provides real-time news and content to sites including MSN, Ask Jeeves, and the BBC.
The additional resources VeriSign provides will be a competitive asset going forward. “We’re competing against the likes of Factiva, Lexis/Nexis and Thompson Dialog – this helps,” Pitkow told internetnews.com.
But in addition to competing for current users, Pitkow noted that waves of new customers are being created, as the demand for news and custom content continues to grow rapidly.
“There are a lot of interesting and emerging uses for this technology you wouldn’t have seen even five years ago,” said Pitkow. “In the enterprise, we could count on some researchers or a librarian for customers, but now we’re seeing things like custom sales portals, so a salesperson can go into a meeting with the latest earnings reports and figures he needs.”
Anther example Pitkow cited is hotels that provide local news and information from content aggregators like Moreover. “None of this existed a few years ago.”
“The new services will make it easier for publishers and bloggers to distribute and track their content, as
well as for our enterprise and Web portal customers to improve the reliability and quality of their feeds as the demand for RSS and Blog information
continues to grow,” Mark McLaughlin, general manager of VeriSign’s Naming and Directory Services, said in a statement.
Pitkow said Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign plans to keep all of Moreover’s 35 employees. The company has offices in San Francisco and London.
VeriSign has bought several content or messaging companies including LightSurf for $270 million and Jamba. Last year’s acquisition of Jamba, the Berlin-based wireless content specialist, was for $273 million in cash and stock.
