VeriSign aggregates Moreover

Net infrastructure firm VeriSign yesterday acquired content aggregator Moreover Technologies in a deal valued at about $30m cash. VeriSign plans to combine Moreover's content aggregation services with its own feed technology to create a real-time aggregation platform for bloggers, publishers, enterprises and Web portals.

Earlier this month VeriSign acquired ping service Weblogs.com, a major piece of the blogging infrastructure, for $2.3m. The content distribution network that VeriSign wants to build using Moreover's technology will use weblog.com's ping server infrastructure for increased reliability. Ping services provide notification every time a new entry is added to a monitored blog or website.

Moreover currently aggregates more than 12,000 news sources and millions of blogs. Customers such as MSN, AskJeeves, and BBC use the technology to supply links to third-party news. Corporates use Moreover to amass real-time information about market and business trends. Moreover Technologies has 35 employees with offices in San Francisco and London.

"By combining the intelligent content of Moreover’s aggregation services with RSS feeds and the reliability of our ping server infrastructure, VeriSign will provide our customers with a highly relevant source of real-time information," said Mark McLaughlin, senior vice president and general manager of VeriSign’s Naming and Directory Services. "The new services will make it easier for publishers and bloggers to distribute and track their content, as well as for our enterprise and Web portal customers to improve the reliability and quality of their feeds as the demand for RSS and Blog information continues to grow." ®