Acquisition day: Intel buys Zarlink, Verisign swallows Weblogs.com

Intel today announced that it agreed to acquire Zarlink Semiconductor’s digital broadcast technologies to deliver "complete platform solutions for consumer electronics (CE) devices in the digital home." The purchase also covers Zarlink’s UK subsidiary, which develops demodulation and tuner technologies to the satellite, terrestrial and cable market segments, Intel said. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

In a separate and unrelated announcement, Verisign said that it purchased the assets of Weblogs.com as well as and its ping service from Scripting News to "provide more stable and reliable communications for the Internet’s blogosphere." A ping server automatically notifies subscribers when new content is posted to a Web site or blog. Weblogs.com is the original ping server created and developed by pioneering blogger Dave Winer, also one of the pioneers of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

According to Verisign, Weblogs.com currently handles nearly two million pings each day and supports thousands of daily RSS feeds from bloggers as well as professional publishers. By migrating Weblogs.com’s ping service to Verisign’s infrastructure, VeriSign said it will be able to offer the users of RSS and real-time content a "robust" platform.

Verisign paid for Weblogs.com and Scripting news $2.3 million in cash.