If you're a serious gamer, Voodoo Computers is the PC industry's Rolls-Royce with cool-looking and powerful systems (albeit at a premium price). Earlier this week, the Calgary-based company said it had agreed to be acquired by Hewlett-Packard for undisclosed amount. So why rush into the arms of HP rather than raising venture capital or doing an IPO? Well, this story goes back to January 2005 when Voodoo came to a strategic fork in the road. As it strived to stay on the bleeding-edge, it ran into size and scale issues because innovation is challenging when you have limited sales volume. Ravi Sood, who owns Voodoo with his brother, Rahul, said discussions with HP started to take place but things were moving at a snail's pace until Mark Hurd took over as CEO. Hurd recognized the value of Voodoo's brand and how it could fit into HP's gaming strategy and leverage its $3.5-billion of R&D. The deal, however, took on some complexity when Dell, which approached Voodoo about a potential acquisition. Ravi Sood said Dell's advances were rejected because Voodoo didn't see any synergy between the two companies. Meanwhile, HP started to look more attractive because it respected the Voodoo brand and it wanted to keep Voodoo in the high-end of the market. "This deal isn't about one plus one," Sood explains. "We weren't motivated to take a check and run the business at status quo. The difference here is HP has applied a veil of autonomy on the Voodoo brand and will integrate their technology." For more check out, CNet and Real Tech News.

I received an e-mail yesterday from someone asking if it was alright if they included my blog posts on a "content collector" that offers people access to a wide variety of Canadian blogs, Web sites, podcasts and video. While it's flattering (and I appreciated someone actually asking for permission), I'm of two minds about the idea. On one hand, getting more exposure can help build a bigger (and better?) brand because, in theory, more people will read your posts. The question, however, is whether many of these readers are curious enough to also visit my blog or whether they're happy to get the content somewhere else. I'm not sure about the answer, although I recently had to tell someone to stop using my material because they were taking (scraping?) every post, including the graphics without permission. In an ideal world, these aggregators would offer a summary of your blog posts and then have a "read more" button that would take re-direct them to your blog. That way, the aggregator get to provide a "sampling service", while the blog author gets more traffic. It's your perfect win-win scenario) You could extend this brand vs. traffic argument to RSS readers  and e-mail services such as FeedBlitz or R/Mail given many people never visit a specific blog again after subscribing to the RSS feed. The big question is whether it really matters. If people are reading your posts - whether it's via e-mail, an RSS reader, an aggregator or your blog - isn't that enough? For most of us, it's probably not a big issue. That said, if you're trying to make money through advertising, you want as much traffic to your blog as possible.