VeriSign Confirms Moreover Buy

VeriSign (VRSN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) confirmed Monday that it acquired online news aggregator Moreover Technologies for $30 million.

The news from Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign comes a week after TheStreet.com reported that the deal was taking place. Last week, VeriSign also agreed to sell its payment gateway business to eBay (EBAY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr).

Moreover, a large online aggregator of real-time news and business information, has operations in San Francisco and London and is used by many organizations for its ability to scour the Internet for information from Web sites, blogs and broadcast feeds. It provides real-time content to services such as Ask Jeeves and Microsoft's (MSFT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) MSN network.

"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."

The news comes two weeks after VeriSign said it had acquired Weblogs.com, a site that provides people with alerts when blogs and Web sites have fresh content posted to them, for $2.3 million. This latest acquisition is part of an attempt to provide "some structure to the endless content or chat available on the Internet and to monetize blogs," a person familiar with the company said last week.

On Monday, VeriSign rose 39 cents to $21.08.