In its third purchase this year, Symantec has announced that it will buy a portion of VeriSign that specializes in Internet security technology. The $1.28 billion deal includes VeriSign's secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate services, public key infrastructure (PKI) services, and identity protection and authentication service. Additionally, Symantec will receive a majority stake in VeriSign Japan.
Symantec's latest agreement should be completed in the third quarter, while its $370 million cash purchase of PGP and GuardianEdge is expected to close this quarter. The company's recent buying spree comes at it attempts to expand its portfolio to become a one-stop shop for security.
By making such acquisitions, Symantec says it is "poised to drive the adoption of identity security as the means to provide simple and secure access to anything from anywhere, to prevent identity fraud and to make online experiences much more user-friendly and hassle-free."
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Ubisoft could follow EA's used games fee model
Ubisoft may soon take a page from EA's book and start monetizing used games by charging extra to unlock functionality or content that would otherwise be available with new games. In a post-earnings conference call today, the company's CFO Alain Martinez answered an analyst's question on this issue, saying, "we are looking very carefully at what EA is doing regarding what we call 'the $10 solution,' and we will probably follow that line sometime in the future."
In case you are not aware of EA's recent integration, they have begun bundling a one-use only "Online Pass" with their sports titles that will be required to enjoy the game over Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. These passes are included for free with new copies of games, but second hand buyers will have to purchase another pass for $10.
Whether such as system is warranted has been a topic of debate -- it helps publishers recoup the lack of revenue from used games sales and also fight piracy. We wouldn't be surprised to see others like Ubisoft following suit, but it surely won't sit well with the millions of people who rent, trade and purchase used games. After Martinez's comment, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot weighed in by saying that the system was already in place since last year, and so far it has been used only to offer additional content to customers buying their games in specific stores.
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Mozilla Weave gets re-branded as Firefox Sync
Mozilla's browser sync tool, Weave, is getting another update this week along with a re-brand meant to help less in-the-know Firefox users understand what the software does. Starting with version 1.3b5 and going forward, Weave will be known as Firefox Sync as Mozilla prepares to start publicizing this little known tool for daily usage. Basically what it does is keep your bookmarks, history, passwords, open tabs and other Firefox data in sync across computers.
Besides the name change, Firefox Sync 1.3b5 features a new user interface, better response times during syncing, new production server clusters built to handle larger loads, Fennec (Firefox Mobile) support, and a backup feature for your bookmarks before the first sync so you can 'undo' any modifications in the event of an accidental overwrite. The full list of changes can be found on the official release notes.
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