Yahoo purchases Actionality, a startup which places ads inside mobile games, to accompany its mobile games portal. [VentureBeat]

ESPN buys Rugby website Scrum.com. If the site is anything like our college rugby team, the purchase was celebrated by raunchy songs, streaking, and an executive kegstand contest. [Reuters]

A Facebook application, "Where I've Been," reportedly sells to TripAdvisor, a division of online travel agency Expedia, for $3 million. This proves the strength of Facebook's so-called "platform" as a vehicle for flipping cheap, trivial ideas to gullible big companies, something everyone in the Valley has been longing for. Update: TripAdvisor is denying some or all of the report, dashing everyone's dreams of Facebook-app millions. [Inside Facebook]

Why are green-eyeshades types calling AdBrite's customers and asking probing questions about the online-advertising network? The company founded by Philip Kaplan of FuckedCompany fame — pictured here with some friends — might be giving accountants an eyeful for a host of reasons. Let's rule out an IPO: The Sequoia Capital-backed startup, with a rumored $40 million in gross revenues, is still too small to go public. That leaves an acquisition as the most likely scenario. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all bought ad marketplaces recently. But for Barry Diller's IAC, which also owns second-tier search engine Ask.com, AdBrite would be a modest purchase. One other possibility: AdBrite could be making a buy of its own to get more heft. Anyone heard more?

Do you guys not wear sandals in the locker rooms? The Scripps Network, having repeatedly scratched its Web 2.0 itch before, finds itself still afflicted. It's looking to spice up recent acquisition Recipezaar with an infusion of what we at Valleywag like to call loser-generated content. The current ingredient of choice is Incando, the maker of personal media-sharing site Pickle, a mashup of Flickr and YouTube. Scripps hopes to spread Pickle across its network of home and garden websites, allowing user-created content to account for 50 percent of its content one day. Figures. Scripps TV programming is all about do-it-yourself, after all.

Who put the itching powder in media companies' Web 2.0-buying jocks? Well, Rupert Murdoch, obviously. Ever since he slurped up MySpace for what now looks like a song, everyone else is trying to find a bargain. Condé Nast bought Wired.com and then Reddit, Forbes just picked up Clipmarks, and now it looks like the Hearst Corporation is adding social shopping network Kaboodle to its kit. Sure, Hearst might be trying to inject some social-networking mojo into its readership, but we suspect this deal is more about pulling the rug out from under Condé Nast's competing portfolio of travel and fashion websites, which use Kaboodle's technology. Such macho posturing over such girly pursuits. Well, whatever scratches your itch, guys.

Notable bombs like Pets.com and Kozmo.com at the height of the Internet bubble scared Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos out of the acquisition business. But he now appears to be cautiously filling up his cart again. So far this year, he's done three publicly announced acquisitions of or investments in startups — more than he did, as far as we can tell, in the Internet-depression years of 2002 through 2004. And that's just through Amazon.com — we're not counting any of the deals he's made on his own through Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment vehicle.



Data

8/6/2007 - Amie Street (demand-based pricing music download service)

2/25/2007 - Shelfari (book-centric social networking)

2/16/2007 - Atomic Moguls (fantasy sports)

12/5/2006 - Wikia (search)

10/2006 - TextPayMe (wireless payment system)

2/27/2006 - Shopbop.com (women's apparel retailer)

6/1/2005 - CustomFlix (download and burn DVDs)

4/10/2005 - Del.icio.us (social bookmarking, later sold to Yahoo)

4/4/2005 - BookSurge LLC (on-demand book-printing)

4/1/2005 - Mobipocket.com (eBooks for mobile devices)

2/9/2005 - 43 Things/Robot Coop ("goal" blogging/social network)

8/19/2004 - Joyo.com Limited (Chinese web retailer)

12/1/2001- Egghead.com (electronics retailer)

12/1/2001 - OurHouse.com (online hardware retailer)

11/9/2001 - Catalog City (catalog merchants)

2/1/2001 - Living.com (online retailer)

4/18/2000 - WineShopper.com (win retailer)

3/28/2000 - eZiba (handicraft retailer)

2/18/2000 - Basis (internationalization technology for web sites)

2/3/2000 - Greg Manning Auctions, Inc. (collectibles)

1/31/2000 - Audible (audio books)

1/24/2000 - Drugstore.com (online drugstore)

1/21/2000 - Greenlight (online car retailer)

1/11/2000 - Kozmo.com (grocery delivery service)

12/1/1999 - Ashford (luxury web retailer)

11/4/1999 - Convergence Corporation (mobile connectivity)

11/1/1999 - Tool Crib of the North (online and catalog tool and home improvement retailer)

11/1/1999 - Della.com (gift registry and suggestions)

11/1/1999 - Back to Basics Toys (toy store)

7/14/1999 - Gear.com (sports merchandise)

5/18/1999 - HomeGrocer.com (online grocer)

4/25/1999 - Accept.com (financial transactions)

4/24/1999 - e-Niche Incorporated (Exchange.com, Bibliofind.com, and Musicfile.com - online marketplaces)

4/1/1999 - LiveBid.com (live internet auctions)

3/29/1999 - Pets.com (online pet supplies)

2/1/1999 - Drugstore.com (online drugstore)

2/1/1999 - Geoworks (wireless communications)

1999 - MindCorps Incorporated (web applications - exact date unknown)

8/4/1998 - Sage Enterprises/PlanetAll (web-based personal management)

8/4/1998 - Junglee (web-based databases)

4/27/1998 - Bookpages (UK online bookstore)

4/27/1998 - Telebook (German online bookstore)

4/27/1998 - IMDB (movie and television directory)

Odds are you've never heard of Chris Downie, or SparkPeople, the diet site he founded in 2001 after leaving eBay. But buyers seem to be interested. We hear that Downie has a $75 million offer on the table. The site has 2 million unique visitors, according to Alarm:clock, making it the third most popular diet website after WeightWatchers.com and Nutrisystem.com, and is expected to break even this year. Seems like a fat price for such slim profits, but diet advertisements are a lucrative staple of the Web.

How much would you pay for a viral-video site which some have charged with stealing clips? Depends on who you ask. eBaum's World has just sold for $15 million. Or is it $17 million? Or $67.5 million? HandHeld Entertainment, the San Francisco-based developer of the ZVUE portable media player, has agreed to shell out $15 million in cash and $2.5 million in stock for the Rochester, N.Y.-based website. The rest will come over the next three years, if eBaum's World meets traffic targets and other conditions. The conditional nature of the deal reflects the buyer's shaky finances — and also, a growing hesitancy to splash cash on websites with uncertain futures.

GoFish, the online-video site whose IPO we took as a sign of stock-market froth, hasn't been producing as many bubbles lately. A deal struck in February for GoFish to buy Bolt Media, a rival video site, has fallen apart, according to Digital Music News. DMN says that licensing video rights for both GoFish and Bolt proved too complicated, and GoFish decided to go it alone. But we think there's more to this story. And yes, there is.

Lost amidst all the hubbub about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones is this little nugget: The little alternative weekly that could, the New York Press, got bought yesterday! Its new owners are "Manhattan Media." You may be familiar with their other publications, New York Family and AVENUE, not to mention a newish outfit called Our Town, Downtown. Doesn't that just sound so quaint! What's even quainter is that the new owners are going to merge Our Town, Downtown with the Press. Just when it seemed like it would be the perfect time for a real competitor to the New Times-ified Voice to emerge, the Press basically gets turned into a community paper. Then there are these reassuring words: "We also anticipate that most current New York Press employees will be joining the Manhattan Media family." (Does that include Martin Basroon, we wonder?) The full memo follows.

Business.com, pursued by Dow Jones, News Corp., and the New York Times, sells to R.H. Donnelly, a printer of yellow-pages directories, for $350 million. [PaidContent.org]

Even more fictitious than Facebook's revenues is its valuation. A market value, after all, requires a willing buyer and a willing seller, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his board members have repeatedly said they don't want to sell. (Facebook has a valuation as a private company, of course, but trust me, it's nothing near the numbers insiders are bandying about.) So why make up multi-billion-dollar valuations for the company, seemingly out of whole cloth? Because it saves them from having to hear out lowball offers, I imagine — and it also sounds mighty fine in the press. Here's a thought for newly hired number-fudger Gideon Yu, however, as well as that stock-plan administrator Facebook wants to hire: The higher a private company's value, the harder it is to dole out lucrative options to new employees. After the jump, my theory on what Facebook's worth, and why.

The Deal has a subscriber-only interview with Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Facebook board member, summarized here. Thiel knocks down talk of a Facebook IPO, saying the company wants to wait another 18 months. But this bit, on the prospects of selling Facebook before it goes public, is classic Thiel:

Opsware, the boring but modestly successful software company founded by Marc Andreessen, has been sold to Hewlett-Packard, the boring but modestly successful hardware company founded by Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, for $1.6 billion. It's a predictable deal — two years ago, I said HP would buy Opsware — but by waiting, Opsware commanded a nice price. The company, after all, only recently crowed about its market cap crossing $1 billion for the first time. Opsware's sale to HP leaves Andreessen free to focus on Ning, his startup which makes software to build social networks. It also put $138 million in his pocket.

These days, Web startups are easier than ever to start — and harder than ever to sell. Carson Systems has apparently found a buyer for DropSend — eight long months after founder Ryan Carson first put the file-sharing Web application up for sale. DropSend has gotten good reviews, but it's in a hotly competitive space, facing rivals as diverse as Pando, Pownce, and YouSendIt, and Carson's conference business appears more promising. (Why bother actually writing Web apps when you can just get people to pay to talk about them?) Anyone know the name of the buyer, and the purchase price?

If Facebook is the Brangelina of tech, then Silicon Valley's it company just adopted an Ethiopian baby. So to speak. The baby is Parakey, a startup cofounded by Blake Ross, the Firefox programmer profiled in Wired, and fellow Firefox developer Joe Hewitt. Ross has been promising more details on Parakey since last November, but they haven't been forthcoming. Parakey's website just tells you to "give your computer the bird." Here's what that means — and what the acquisition means for Facebook.

It's a modern-day Web 2.0 romance: TechCrunch hypes website, TechCrunch buys website. InviteShare, a site which put itself up for sale shortly after TechCrunch reviewed it, now shows that its domain name is registered in Michael Arrington's name. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just buy it first, before the hype ran its price up, though? [Techomical]

Jupitermedia (owners of photo provider Jupiterimages and a fleet of websites) just bought Mediabistro, a site for media professionals that includes specialized job ads, articles, and insider media news, for $23 million. Mediabistro's a small service — exceedingly small, with some 50,000 unique visitors a month I can't even remember why I made this obvious error; Mediabistro gets six million pageviews a month. — but one well known in the journalist scene. And it's apparently more familiar to those at the Gray Lady than new parent company Jupitermedia. Contrary to the New York Times report, the company hasn't owned JupiterResearch for years. A more ironic divestiture, given the purchase of Mediabistro: Having sold tech jobs board Dice.com in 2005 for $200 million, Jupitermedia is now buying its way back into the recruiting business, adding Mediabistro's media-job listings to its JustTechJobs website.

Perhaps newly installed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is still too busy receiving accolades to ponder this question: Is his company's deal to buy Rivals.com - set to be announced tomorrow but leaked online this evening - actually worth the $100 million price tag? [CNBC.com]