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.

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.