Talk about ROI! Eighteen months after Accel-KKR acquired Alias Systems for $57.5-million, it sold Alias to Autodesk for $182-million. That's a cool 300% return. Toronto-based Alias, which makes special effects software used for movies such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, has been a hot potato in the past few years. Before Accel-KKR appeared on the scene in April 2004, it was owned by SGI. Alias has  sales of $83 million and 600 employees, mostly in Canada.

I swung by an ATM machine earlier today to get some cash - you know that paper-based currency that used to be quite popular. With debit and credit cards, I often go days without cash in my wallet. San Francisco-based Pay By Touch Solutions wants to take the paperless society even further with biometric technology that lets you pay for a purchase by swiping your finger across a scanner, punching in a PIN. The company raised $130-million in financing today to bolster its growth strategy, which has been highlighted by a pilot project run by the Piggly Wiggly grocery market chain. Silicon Beat gives Pay by Touch credit for tapping hedge funds "sloshing" with cash given the $130-million consisted of $55-million in convertible notes and $75-million in loans.
Speaking of payments systems, I met last week with the Mint Inc., which is trying to promote the idea of pre-paid credit cards. One of the areas they want to target is online purchases by people - i.e. teenagers - who don't have credit cards or can't convince their parents to hand over the Visa. While the technology is interesting, I can't see a huge market for pre-paid credit cards. I mean, how many people are still worried enough not to be put their credit card numbers on the Web? And who wants to give Visa or Mastercard your hard-earned money before you really need to do it?

Om Malik - once again - has the scoop on a deal: this one involving Newsgator's acquisition of Ranchero Software, which makes a Mac-based RSS reader called NetNewsWire. This got me thinking about a Technorati-related issue when it comes to rankings. Like many bloggers, the growth of my  blogroll has slowed down dramatically in the past few months. Instead, I put all of the blogs of interest into FeedDemon where I can easily categorize them and quickly get summaries of dozens of blogs in minutes. The question is what does this do for Technorati's ratings, which are based on links from different sites? If fewer people link, you could have a popular site but have a low Technorati rating. As well, a fellow blogger mentioned to me recently that he's been noticing fewer links on the blogs that he reads. It's like people just want to get their thoughts out there as quickly as possible without the aggravation of providing links. Personally, this is a huge brech of blog-ettiquete. It is a lack of respect for other people's ideas/views and akin to not providing footnotes. Getting back to Technorati again - if fewer people are linking within their posts, then how does that affect their ratings? Is there a better way to rank blogs. Perhaps one of the major search engines (Google, Lycos) has something that will counter the affects of blogroll and link fatigue.

Google's battle against Microsoft will be ratched up a notch or two later today when Google unveils a deal with Sun Microsystems that will bring open-source StarOffice software suite to Google users. I guess one way of looking at this agreement is if Google can't knock off Windows as the operating systems, the backup plan is to launch products and services (StarOffice, Gmail, GoogleTalk, etc.) that will make life miserable for folks up in Redmond. For more details on how this marriage will work, check out Internet News. What I would like Google to do next is launch a branded Web browser to take a real run at Microsoft's Internet stronghold. Whether it does a deal Firefox or another browser (Flock, Netscape as perhaps part of a bigger deal to buy AOL), a Google-branded would provide the ideal platform for Google to direct users to it various Web properties and, as a result, drive even more AdSense revenue. Now that I think about it, I'm puzzled why Google has been fooling around with services such as GMail, Froogle and Okrut when the real online prize is the browser. Larry and Sergey are just too smart to not have a browser strategy. Then again, it took Google years to finally get into the e-mail game so perhaps the Wonder Boys are waiting for the right opportunity. When Robert Scoble is finished lobbying Microsoft for money so he can make an acquisition, perhaps he can start pushing for Google to buy Flock!