Google's Deals: Morning Tech Bytes

Google's deal with Groupon reportedly fell through; the company was climbing $5 in pre-market trading.
By Maggie Overfelt ,

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Google's (GOOG) - Get Report much-hyped deal to buy daily deal site Grouponfell through Friday evening, when the startup reportedly walked away from the offer, which was rumored to be as big as $6 billion. Groupon, which would have provided Google with valuable insight into customers' Web buying and searching behavior in localized markets, could be mulling an IPO, reported the Chicago Breaking Business blog.

Google completed two other acquisitions late last week, buying digital rights management/streaming video firm

Widevine

and

Phonetic Arts

, which will help the search giant improve its range of speech-based services.

Google was trading up almost $5 to $577.98 in pre-market trading.

Facebook

is rolling out a revamp of users' profile pages, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining the changes on

60 Minutes

Sunday night. Among the updates, aimed to better highlight more useful information about users, is the display of vital stats at the top of profile pages and a stream of photos beneath it.

The Indian government is speaking with

Research In Motion's

(RIMM)

BlackBerry customers about

accessing data

transmitted via the company's secure networks, according to a report from

The Wall Street Journal

. While the government had said it won't move to block service, it's worried that terrorists might be using BlackBerry devices to communicate.

RIM shares were down 40 cents to $62.25 in pre-market trading.

Rumors continue to circulate around

AOL

(AOL)

and

Yahoo!

(YHOO)

, this time with

Reuters

reporting that

AOL is exploring a split

of its legacy dial-up service provider network and its display advertising business. The transaction could eventually involve a merger with Yahoo!, says the report.

AOL was up 14 cents to $25.32 in pre-market trading while Yahoo was up 0.13% to $16.37.

--Written by Maggie Overfelt in New York.

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