Boy, the folks south of the border sure like our tech companies. This time around it's Burnaby, B.C.-based Convedia Inc., which has been acquired by RadiSys Corp. for US$105-million. It's a sweet return for Convedia's investors, which includes Ventures West, Mayfield Ventures and Terry Matthews' Wesley Clover. Convedia makes media servers for telecom carriers and enterprise customers that want to offer VoIP and IMS services. Convedia, which had has won a ton of industry awards recently, was on a revenue run-rate of $20-million based on its second-quarter results. The RadiSys press release can be found here.

Infonetics expectsVoIP revenue is poised to explode over the next three years to become a $120-billion business. In North America, it forecasts revenue to climb to $13.3-billion by 2009 from $2.6-billion in 2005, while sales in Europe and Asia will reach $12.7-billion and $12.9-billion respectively. The number of VoIP subscribers will double this year to 47 million. In North America, Vonage's market share has dropped to 27% from 34%.

YouTube CEO Chad Hurley - the man of the moment on the Web - was at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit conference where he talked about how the video-sharing company is making revenue, creating a new advertising platform and building a sales team. For YouTube fans, this will mean the appearance of banners, sponsorships and contests. The trick for YouTube will be retaining the user experience while trying to introduce a bigger commercial element. My column in today's Financial Post (subscription required) looks at the video frenzy and how investors are piling on the bandwagon. It is an environment reminiscent of the e-commerce rage during the dot-com boom where dozens of start-ups of auction sites were launched to compete against eBay. At the AlwaysOn conference today, Kleiner Perkins partner Vinod Khosla made an excellent point relevant to the video industry when he talked about how home-run VC investments happen in markets that can be out of favour (i.e. investing in Infinera in 2001 after the telecom boom ended) and new markets where you're not trying to "create something better than other companies" (see the video-sharing industry).
Update: The San Jose Mercury has a story on YouTube and how it plans to stick with short video clips rather than streaming movies (a good strategy if you want to avoid the sticky issue of copyright violation, although I suspect if NBC wants to pay YouTube to stream a few episodes of a new show, Hurley will glad take it.)