At last, an end is in sight for Steve Case's misadventure in the healthcare industry. Revolution Health, his health-information website, is in merger talks with Everyday Health, a better-run, New York-based rival with more Web traffic. The combination would have more traffic than WebMD. Three's a trend, isn't it? If the deal goes through, this will be the third time Case has dumped a company he mismanaged on someone else's shareholders.

Milpitas-based flash-memory maker SanDisk may sell out to Korean megavendor Samsung, the world's biggest maker of memory chips. As prices for flash memory drop, SanDisk sale rumors have floated for weeks, including word of a possible acquisition by hard-drive maker Seagate. But Samsung could use SanDisk's portfolio of patents to beat back its rival Toshiba, which currently has a manufacturing partnership with SanDisk. Not to mention save some money: The Wall Street Journal reports Samsung pays SanDisk $400 million to $500 million a year in flash-memory royalties.

Online-music service Napster's management says the company is "open to a sale" — to anyone, that is, except the activist shareholders trying to get on its board. [PaidContent]

Microsoft will acquire Greenfield Online, which operates European comparison shopping site Ciao.com, for $17.50 per share or $486 million. Ciao works by directing shoppers to some 2,200 merchants, who then pay Ciao when those shoppers buy goods. ComScore says Ciao sees 26.5 million visitors a month. Last quarter, Greenfield reported revenues of $36 million and $2.1 million in profit. Following its strategy to split search marketing revenues with Web searchers, Microsoft says it eventually plans to share with them some of the money Ciao's merchants pay.Newspapers have stuffed their Sunday editions full of coupons for as long as we can remember, so there must be some money in being the middleman who passes on word of discounts and deals. The difference is that coupons are simple. They are delivered to you and then you just cut them out and hand them to the cashier when you buy your milk. Microsoft's cashback plan has a higher barrier to entry. We're skeptical as to how many searchers will take the time to give Microsoft access to their bank accounts in order to earn a couple pennies back on the book they just bought from Amazon.com.

Cisco Systems will acquire open source email and calendar software-maker PostPath for $215 million. Cisco VP Charles Carmel says the company will integrate PostPath, usually called an alternative to Microsoft's Exchange, with WebEx software, which Cisco acquired for $3.2 billion in March 2007. It's only big-spending Cisco's fourth buy of the year — for the networking giant, a tightening of the purse. There were zero tech IPOs last quarter and also relatively few major acquisitions. Which means PostPath investors Matrix Partners, Jafco Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners are no doubt gluttonously bathing in the schadenfreude this morning.

Amazon.com's newly acquired book-readers social network, Shelfari, has a bad reputation. The main charges lodged: It has grown its userbase through a shady techniques such as automatically sending site invites to everyone in a new user's email address book. It's also believed to engage in "astroturfing" —- specifically, pretending to be users in blog comments to buff up its image. Gawker last year described the site as "basically social networking rapists" — a perhaps inelegant phrasing, but one that gets the point across.Shelfari CEO Josh Hug — how can you dislike a man whose last name is "Hug"? —blamed the whole mess on "an unexperienced but well-meaning intern." Ironically, the company that exposed Shelfari's tactics was rival books social network LibraryThing. AbeBooks, a recently acquired Amazon.com subsidiary, owns 40 percent of LibraryThing. Who will be motivated to report on Shelfari's user-gathering tactics now? Oh, right — that would be you, gentle reader!

The most powerful player in the book business besides Oprah, Amazon.com, just got a little more powerful with the acquisition of Shelfari, a social network for bookworms. Not yet formally announced, the deal would give Amazon total control over a competitor to a similar site, LibraryThing, in which the company has already taken a stake through an earlier acquisition, according to Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter John Cook.It makes sense: Why pay to develop your own social software when you can buy up existing technology and communities of potential customers as well? Never mind the apparent conflict of interest, or Shelfari's spammy history. Those concerns are for companies who aren't trying to corner nascent markets through vertical integration. (Photo by Tim Mansfield)

Chipmaker AMD's cash reserves dropped 17 percent during the first half of 2008. To boost that investor-worrying number, AMD has agreed to sell its digital-TV business to Broadcom for $193 million. 530 AMD employees will join Broadcom as a result. A job perk: Hearing about the fun times Broadcom veterans enjoyed when ex-CEO Henry Nicholas ran the shop.

Salesforce.com spent $31.5 million on August 4 to acquire San Francisco-based call center software company InStranet. It's Salesforce.com's largest acquisition ever. Careful with the champagne, though.InStranet went through its third round of funding way back in 2001, when it raised $14.7 million at a $50 million valuation in a round joined by Benchmark Capital. So it's not a huge exit. Then again, at least it's an exit. Salesforce.com will also report its second quarter earnings today. Analysts expect $260.56 million in revenues for a 47.6 percent year over year growth.

After Electronic Arts said it will not renew its takeover bid for videogame house Take-Two, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick wrote EA CEO John Riccitiello a letter asking if his company could please present itself to EA management before it makes any final decisions. Riccitiello relented. Zelnick's goal: Convinve EA to raise its current offer to buy Take-Two from $25.74 per share, a price Zelnick says "undervalues Take-Two's franchise and financial performance." For his part, Riccitiello announced over the weekend EA would allow its bid to lapse this evening because it would be impossible to get any deal done before the start of the holiday shopping season. Take-Two shares are down 2.5 percent on today's trading. We always thought PowerPoint was a bit of a buzzkill.

Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the RSS ad network, was just the latest, following Jaiku, JotSpot, Dodgeball, GrandCentral, and Measure Map. Their tales of doom in the Googleplex, below.

The deal isn't finalized yet, but AOL will acquire Colorado-based startup SocialThing, News.com reports. Best known for a raging party it threw at this year's South By Southwest conference, SocialThing also aggregates an Internet user's feeds and activity from sites like Flickr and Twitter. If that sounds familiar, its because you've subjected yourself to the ramblings of people like Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble who use a similar service called FriendFeed and talk about it a lot. They talk about it a lot because they think its really popular, but the truth is that FriendFeed suggests them as new friends to every user who joins the site. A thought: Wouldn't it be funny if AOL bought SocialThing because AOL dealmakers read too much Scoble, Arrington and Calacanis and so they think FriendFeed is the new, new thing and rushed out to by its closest competitor? Don't put it past the bunch that paid $850 million for Bebo.

eBay, having failed to catch on in the heavily-wired nation of South Korea, is in talks with Korean site Gmarket. A few days ago, Gmarket announced Q2 sales of nearly $1 billion, which generated $35 million in revenue. Yahoo bought 10 percent of the company in 2006 for approximately $60 million. [NYT]

As promised, Google has found a buyer for Performics, the search-marketing business it acquired when it bought DoubleClick. French ad conglomerate Publicis will take the Chicago-based company off Google's hands for an amount that so far remains undisclosed — probably because the fire-sale price will be low enough to be immaterial to both companies. [Reuters]

When it releases its second-quarter numbers Wednesday, Time Warner will also announce it's ready to dump AOL's dialup business. A combination of modem banks, CD-ROM mailers, and ruthless telemarketers which introduced America to the information superhighway in the 1990s, AOL's ISP business still has more than 8 million subscribers who pay through the nose for a quaintly overpriced service. What will be left: A collection of websites and an online-advertising business that has yet to get advertisers to pay anything even vaguely overpriced. Time Warner has flirted with Yahoo and Microsoft for years, but hasn't yet sealed a deal to get rid of AOL, the business which, on paper, acquired Time Warner at the turn of the millennium.But Microsoft and Yahoo, both looking ofr more heft, are still in talks to buy AOL. Once the separation — mostly "a bookkeeping exercise," reports the Wall Street Journal — is complete, selling off the advertising business should prove easier. Discussions with Yahoo are "the more advanced of the two," says a source who describes the deal as one that would combine AOL and Yahoo and give Time Warner a $10 billion stake in the company. It's a proposal AOL and Yahoo began discussing in April. Whether or not a deal is consummated, the fact that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is still considering it just shows how much pressure he's under from shareholders, even after last week's subdued shareholder meeting.

Trash hauler Republic Services was set to be acquired by Allied Waste Industries in a stock transaction worth $6.2 billion. But then Waste Management Inc. stepped in, matching the $6.2 billion offer but in cash. Turns out that through Cascade Investment, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates owns a stake in both Republic and WMI — pitting Gates in a bitter hostile takeover bid against Gates. [Earth2Tech]

The Wall Street Journal's Pepper ... & Salt has never been particularly cutting-edge. But a recent cartoon reads like a time capsule: An entrepreneur at startup WotsHot.com says, "Here's our timetable: launch, grow rapidly, be bought by Google." How quaint! During the lean years earlier in the decade, when Google was the only show in town, startups may have dreamt of getting bought by Google. But more recently, getting bought by Google has proven a nightmare, albeit a lucrative one. The oldtimers at YouTube are resting and vesting, watching the clocks tick. JotSpot's wiki product languished for a year before getting relaunched in barely functional form. Measure Map, a Web-traffic analysis startup, was similarly buried.And who can blame them? Google coddles engineers, but it also suffocates them. With the free food, massages, and laundry come a quirky set of in-house technologies and an increasingly bureaucratic, insider-driven culture. A favored clique of Google-IPO lottery winners rule over what's supposed to be a meritocracy. Marissa Mayer, Larry Page's ex-girlfriend, rules with an iron fist over what features see the light of day in Google's all-important search engine. Google used to pitch startups on the notion of selling to them rather than give a stake to VCs; Chris Sacca, a former Googler expert in peddling empty promises, led this effort. Not surprising that it didn't work out. Google is now getting into the VC business itself — a tacit acknowledgement that it is no longer an attractive destination for startup founders. As an investor, Google gets a look at new technologies and talents. Entrepreneurs get to keep their freedom. Funny, freedom is exactly what Google used to promise the companies it acquired — and what it no longer has to offer. (Cartoon by Pepper & Salt/WSJ)

My esteemed colleague Owen Thomas worries that analyst firm Forrester Research, by buying its longtime rival JupiterResearch, has reduced the number of alternative opinions that will be floated in the media on any given topic. But by bringing Jupiter analysts including blogger favorite Michael Gartenberg aboard, Forrester will actually lessen the number of wrong opinions treated as near-fact by the mainstream media. I could spend a couple of days correlating Forrester vs. Jupiter on a spread of topics over the past decade. But screw it, I'm a journalist — two's a trend. Here are Forrester's two biggest misses I never forgot:

Yesterday, YouTube acquired Omnisio, a Valley startup that developed tools to allow users to trim online videos and assemble multiple clips together. The company also started deploying speech-to-text technology to create searchable data from within videos, starting with videos from the Obama and McCain campaigns — this will make opposition research so much easier! But have you tried uploading a video to YouTube recently? The experienced hasn't changed in months, if not years.Basic tools to help creators and other uploaders — like an upload status bar or a timer to let you know when an uploaded clip has been transcoded — are missing. For large clips, this can be maddening. Make a mistake uploading a clip? Good luck trying to replace the clip you've already uploaded with another. And if you accidentally upload the same clip twice, that's just time lost, since even with new descriptions set it'll be flagged as a "duplicate" and deleted. If your audio suddenly sounds terrible, its because YouTube forces it through a blunt compression filter. But hey, you can add funny captions to your videos! When it comes to user experience for content creators, Vimeo and Blip.tv beat it soundly. But then why should YouTube care? If you want access to viewers who will inevitably slag you and your work in the comments, you'll have to put up with it to a degree. Better to post your content to YouTube via third-party tools like TubeMogul, which will also cross-post your video to multiple sites — making it the one-stop shop for content creators looking to publish that YouTube might have been.

Analyst firms exist for two reasons: First, to dispense words posing as wisdom, for free, to journalists, as a publicity scheme to get their name out. Second, to dispense words posing as wisdom, for large sums of money, to corporations, who have read their quotes in the press. Forrester Research is acquiring JupiterResearch, which will have the salubrious effect of reducing the wear and tear on reporters' phone keypads. And instead of two wrong predictions? Only one. We hope the antitrust authorities do not block this deal.