Naspers, the South African media giant, has offered to buy Polish IM service Gadu Gadu, for a total of about $155 million. Gadu is listed on the Polish stock exchange, and Naspers will launch a public offer to buy the shares.

Gadu Gadu is one of Poland’s largest instant messaging companies, with 6 million unique users and a 43% share of the Polish market. It also has a social network mojageneracja, which has just under million uniques. Naspers already has a global presence, includin China, Russia, Thailand, the US, and others. Gadu Gadu is one of the many entrants for the instant messaging market. Should Naspers get this public tender offer, it will be adding to its global reach, especially in Europe, where it’s somewhat less influential than some of the other countries it has a presence in.

More acquisition news

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Yesterday was a big day for Google. It reached a new benchmark for stock prices, soaring to $600 early this morning. Need I say more? This new share price is said to be attributed to this wave of investor confidence in Internet advertising technology. In case you were thinking of investing in Google in order to get in on some of this cash-cow funness, analysts have also been predicting that Google could reach the $700 mark next year.

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Facebook users can now check Gmail from their Facebook account with a new Facebook application called Fmail. Fmail is built on Gmail Lite, and displays gmail in an Inframe inside the Facebook account. Users have multiple tabs for mailbox actions like inbox access, spam folder and are also provided with a separate compose button.

Fmail application is a nice utility and in the days to come new features are bound to be added. The Fmail application has been developed by two MIT college students, Courtland Allen and Aaron Rosado.

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Justin.tv has opened its network, which means that anyone can now use its platform for broadcasting live video across the web. With its partnership with On2 Technologies, you can create your own Justin.tv experience. As a user you’ll get a personalized channel page, where you can customize the header, background, add widgets, etc.

As with most webcam communities, you can post a schedule of your upcoming shows and events. What hasn’t caught on with all webcam networks however is the ability to embed live video, which is a feature now offered on Justin.tv. This is something that will gain steam over the next year.

This move has been expected since the initial launching of Justin.tv, and it’s finally arrived. The next steps? Well, we’ve seen a growing trend of premium content being streamed live to other networks like Ustream. I imagine this ongoing merging of premium and amateur content in the online market will continue through to the webcam world.

[Via Mashable]

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It was just reported in The Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is in talks to acquire up to a 5% stake in facebook. This is big technology and business news.

WSJ: Microsoft is in talks with Facebook about making an investment in the social-networking startup that could value Facebook at $10 billion or more… Google has also expressed strong interest…

If successful, Microsoft’s talks with Facebook could give it an up-to-5% stake in the closely-held startup—a stake potentially valued at roughly $300 million to $500 million. The discussions are still preliminary and Facebook could wind up not taking an investment from either Microsoft or Google. Factors in the discussions include the valuation the suitors would offer to Facebook and other business considerations they could contribute to sweeten any deal.

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eBay today announced that Niklas Zennstrom (co-founder of Skype, Kazaa and Joost) has stepped down as CEO of Skype. Zennstrom, who co-founded Skype in 2003, will become non-executive chairman of the Skype Board of Directors. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s Chief Strategy Officer, will become acting CEO until a permanent successor is found.

eBay also announced that it has paid $530 million to settle all of its future obligations under the earn-out agreement signed with certain Skype shareholders when eBay acquired Skype in 2005. The earn-out agreement provided for payments of up to approximately $1,700 based upon specific active user, revenue and gross profit targets that were to be achieved in 2008 and the first half of 2009.

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Joost, the impeccably pedigreed, funded, and hyped Internet TV platform is releasing its software to the general public on Monday.

Joost is seeing 50,000 beta downloads per week, and with open access hopes to receive between two million and three million users by the end of the year (for this figure the company counts unique user IDs, not downloads of every upgrade of its player), CEO Mike Volpi said in an interview last week (see the video below).

So, is it going to kill off TV as we know it? Probably not yet, is the short answer. The problem is, although it’s video - and very good quality video at that - it currently has to live on your PC, which means the office or spare room rather than living room.

“Today marks the beginning of an exciting phase for Joost – we are officially open for business,” said David Clark, executive vice president of global advertising for Joost. “We’re enabling our viewers to share Joost with their friends and family, and we’re working collaboratively with the world’s leading advertisers and agencies to design a new ad model for the next generation of television.”

Last week, Joost announced that it had signed more than 30 blue-chip brands, including The Coca-Cola Company, HP, Intel and Nike, as advertising launch partners. Beginning today, advertisements from some of the ad launch partners will begin to play on the platform. Advertisements from all ad launch partners will be on Joost later this month.

Previously available in an expanded beta, Joost now is available to an unlimited number of friends, family and colleagues of existing beta testers. Starting today, when beta testers visit the “Invite Friends” widget in the “My Joost” area of Joost, they will be able to invite anyone they know to the Joost community. Both new and existing users can download a new version of Joost today.

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Microsoft will hold a event on Tuesday in Redmond to herald the second generation of Zune music players, Bandwidth Blog has learned.

According to sources close to the situation, both Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Design and Development chief J Allard will be on hand for the event. The main part of the announcement will center around the players, which will include the first flash memory based Zunes.

About 2.4 million next-generation Zunes will be manufactured during the 2007 holiday season, according to reports. Two-thirds of these players are expected to be flash-based, showing that Microsoft is indeed aware of the much higher popularity of flash players, which are cheaper.

Currently, Microsoft sells approximately one Zune for every 25 iPods but the company is committed to increasing their market-share.

Other Zune news:

Zune phone to come - iZune?

Microsoft get it wrong with the Zune

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