Cisco, US networking giant announced that it has purchased Versly, a firm that makes collaboration devices for Microsoft's renowned Office software. Financial situations of the acquisition were not revealed yet.

Software made by the San Francisco-located Versly enables for collaboration on content in Office programs such as Excel, Powerpoint as well as Word. Cisco said the acquirement of the privately owned Versly will allow it to offer advanced collaboration solutions to consumers.

The Palo Alto, California building that held the PayPal headquarters at one time, is now home for startups Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico, aged 25 and 24 respectively. Their venture, an online payments company is backed by an investor group with the likes of Max Levchin (PayPal cofounder). What’s exciting is that part of their business mission is to steal part of PayPal’s business.

The duo founded WePay, a service for online payments that allows you gather amounts for expenses that are shared with others, may it be a group gift for someone or fundraising for a cause. The company which started off in 2008 has gathered $9 million as initial capital from A-listers of the Silicon Valley comprising Ron Conway (who backed Facebook, Google and Twitter), Steve Chen (founder – YouTube) and Eric Dunn (former CTO of Intuit – now, INTU).

WePay focuses exclusively on group payments and this, Max Levchin, the investor, believes will help the company gain a considerable share of the online payment market, a market which was established in 1998 by his (then) PayPal. PayPal was later acquired by Ebay, at a cost of $1.5 billion. He (Levchin) says that the duo showed up and said 'Hey, this is what PayPal doesn't do well.' To which he replied that he knew. All that was left then was to establish that the duo could do it.

Aberman had the idea to develop WePay around two years back as he was trying hard to gather funds for his brother’s bachelor party. The amount of $4200 was to be collected from 14 guys for renting a beach house in Florida, for a bottle service at a club and to buy burgers, beers and chips, enough to feed the small army. For him, collecting the money was annoying. Several weeks went by as he went about irritating and collecting cash and checks from people sprawled across the nation. He hoped there should have been a better way of doing it.

According to news reports, Google is getting closer to shutting down its search engine in China. This news comes, after the negotiations between Google and Chinese Government failed.

Google had threatened to halt its operations in China, following a targeted cyber attack on Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in December. Google announced on Jan.12 that it was planning to give all its users open access to the internet. Since then, Google has been negotiating with the Chinese Government, as this move would clash with the Chinese censorship laws. This situation has resulted in a deadlock and reports suggest that the Chinese Government has started informing news sites in the country about Google’s exit.

However, Google’s spokesperson declined to comment on the negotiations, but Jill Hazelbaker, spokeswoman for Google said that the announcement would be made soon in weeks, and not in months. Shares of Google fell by 3% in the morning trade whereas shares of rival Baidu soared 7%. China is one of the few markets where Google does not dominate the search market.

It is being assumed that Microsoft won’t suffer too much with its stay in China and continue to censor search results. However, it is said that this may bring some bad press to Microsoft, with plenty of widespread criticism.

Disney is on the look out of a buyer for its struggling Miramax Unit. According to a mergers and acquisitions expert, the Miramax film unit of the Walt Disney Company is open for bidding and has attracted around 10 bidders. The film unit has a 700-film library that includes films like ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love’. The initial discussions imply a price of over $700 million for the art house label.

Miramax delivered specialty films like “Chicago”, “The Queen”, “Kill Bill”, “No Country for Old Men” and “The English Patient” and many of the films in the library were nominated for more than 200 Academy Awards. Disney has been looking to find a bidder for the label and scale down its division even announcing the closure of Miramax in October.

Summit Entertainment is a potential buyer while the Weinstein brothers who founded Miramax are not among the bidders till now. Summit Entertainment is the privately owned studio that released ‘Twilight’ blockbusters and is currently rich in cash. However, it doesn’t have a large library.

Greenhill Capital Partners is backing Acrisure, a Michigan-based insurance agency operator, by investing $20 million. The PE firm’s deal plans to back the mergers and acquisitions minded insurance company’s expansion.

Greenhill Capital Partners is currently managing four PE funds consisting of two US private equity funds, a European PE fund and a US venture capital fund. They have a successful track record investing in energy, insurance, telecommunications, financial services, telecommunications and education and business services industries.

Seventeen separate deals build Acrisure and the private equity firm’s investment in the firm will be utilized to support the future growth initiatives of the company. The size of the stake provided to the firm has not been disclosed and calls needing comments have not been returned either.

Diamond Castle Partners is a New York based equity firm which bought Suture Express Inc. Suture Express is a distributor of disposable medical and surgical products. Linden LLC and CHS Private Equity LP are the investment arms of Code Hennessy & Simmons LLC. They are a group of investors who exited the company after an ownership of more than three years.

These PE investors had initially bought the company from its founders and have made great contributions in expanding the company’s product offerings and customer base. The joint private equity ownership team helped improve the customer base of Suture Express and its product offerings alike.

Diamond Castle Partners have bought the disposable medical products company, Suture Express Inc. Diamond Castle Partners has made investments across various fields including entertainment, Internet and technology, advertising and media, manufacturing and food services industries.

US drugmaker Cephalon Inc is planning to expand into generic drug business to diversify its product line. With an increase in its shares by 1.5 percent, the company is looking to expand internationally. Cephalon announced that they would be buying Mepha AG for about $590 million for expansion.

Mepha AG, the Swiss generic drugmaker is owned by Germany’s Merckle family and markets above 120 products in 50 countries. Mepha had sales of about $377 million in 2009 and Cephalon is looking to double the size of its international business with the deal.

Cephalon gained popularity with its sleep disorder drug Provigil. Nuvigil, its successor drug, also features in its product line along with pain product Fentora and cancer drug Treanda. Mepha features multiple products including Diclofenac for pain, as gel and patch. The merger move by Cephalon denotes a departure from its usual mergers and acquisitions strategy.

Internet giant yahoo reported a $153 million net profit in the fourth quarter of 2009, but the sales of the company continue to fall. But still, this was the best quarterly financial performance since Carol.A.Bartz took over as the chief executive a year ago. This profit is good as compared to $303 million loss in the same period last year. However, the revenues fell by 4% to $1.7 billion.

The shares of Yahoo surged by 1% in the after-hours trading as the news of profits was announced. Yahoo struggled throughout the year due to global downturn and trimmed the budget by slashing more than 2,000 jobs. Ms. Bartz said that the fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, and that this was a transformative year for Yahoo.

Yahoo reported 11 cents per share and said that it would have made 15 cents per share, if not the charges tied with a proposed partnership with Microsoft. Still it was more than the average estimates of 11 cents per share by analysts. Yahoo had been struggling since December 2007, as Google has enhanced its dictatorship in the search market.