VeriSign has announced its acquisition of Moreover Technologies. The deal follows VeriSign’s related acquisition of Weblogs.com a few weeks ago.
Moreover is a provider of real-time news, current awareness, and business information. Unlike traditional aggregators, Moreover uses technology to scour the Web and harvest news and business information. Moreover has been a darling of the information industry, harnessing XML and RSS to create low-cost current awareness solutions without the cumbersome licensing infrastructure borne by its traditional competitors. The acquisition of Moreover by VeriSign provides deep pockets and robust technology that will make Moreover even more of a contender going forward.
The key synergies and strategic rationales in this acquisition are (1) VeriSign's major infrastructure role in the Internet (branded as Intelligent Infrastructure) and operation of major ping server services (by virtue of its acquisition of Dave Winer’s Weblogs ping servers) combined with (2) Moreover's leading role and expertise in real-time content harvested from the Internet. The combination provides Moreover with robust scalable content aggregation technology and signals that Moreover and VeriSign believe that the ability to scale aggregation of RSS-enabled content to match the explosion of blogs is key to the future of the online information industry. Ping servers are essentially ping aggregators that sit between blogs and search/aggregation sites. Each ping contains the URI and date/time of the new content. Search/aggregation services use ping servers to let them know when/where there is new content to be indexed.
This is a really intriguing and potentially very positive move for VeriSign. Outsell thinks there is indeed a significant market opportunity for someone to help publishers build robust content syndication platforms that can be used to monetize content feeds. The acquisition of the ping server by VeriSign puts the company immediately into a lead role in providing ping server services. By adding Moreover’s well-honed expertise in content harvesting and syndication to its arsenal, VeriSign will become an interesting player in the publishing space.
