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.

In the newsrooms of Silicon Valley, they call it "going native." In New York, media is a semirespectable profession, and the skyscraper snobs of the world's leading infotainment conglomerates assume that those who drop out for lesser arts like PR just couldn't cut it. Not so here. Erika Brown, who covered venture capital for Forbes, is leaving the magazine to join Matrix Partners as the VC firm's director of marketing and business development. (Biz dev? I can't picture Brown, a snappy dresser, in blue shirts and pleated khakis.) Did Brown parlay her contacts from reporting into a new job? It's hard to imagine she didn't. And one can hardly blame her. The death of magazines may or may not be imminent. But serving time in a distant bureau of a magazine which is mostly diffident about the Valley is a career killer. Brown's note to friends: