EBay has reached a deal to sell its enterprise unit, a division focused on building and running online shopping sites for bricks-and-mortar retailers, for less than half than it paid four years ago.

In what SAP and City Football Group (CFG) call a "groundbreaking event" for the sport of soccer, the two companies today announced a global, multi-year marketing and technology partnership that will provide CFG and its four international football clubs with analytics for business operations, fan engagement and player and team performance.

Microsoft will be handing over its display advertising business to AOL in nine markets as part of a new partnership between the two companies that was announced Monday.

Unilever, the world's second largest advertising company and the owner of 490 brands, yesterday crowned UK digital firm, Glimr, the winner of its international Scale Up competition at the Digital Shoreditch festival in London.

In the Internet era, many multibillion-dollar acquisitions sound insanely ambitious and out of line.

Verizon Communications has agreed to buy AOL for about US$4.4 billion, as it looks to build more extensive digital and video platforms to drive future growth.

Agile projects involve close collaboration and very fast feedback loops. When it works, users' expectations are closely aligned to the project deliverables, and very little time is wasted on nice-to-haves or perfectionism that has no business impact. Agile done right is a thing of beauty, and economical to boot.

Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring.

Facebook continued growing its business with ads placed on small screens last quarter, when it generated 73 percent of its sales from mobile ads.

In an effort to boost its mobile offerings, Yahoo is reportedly finishing up a deal to buy Foursquare.

By now, it's pretty clear that marketing tech scares the bejesus out of modern marketers. Technology stacks, integration layers, APIs, oh my! Techies add to these fears by throwing tech jargon in a marketer's face, explaining technology to a marketer in a condescending way, and even snickering at the perceived simplicity of the marketer's craft.

The marketing tech landscape has been expanding at an impressive clip over the last three years. It now boasts more than 3,000 vendors, including giants such as Adobe and Oracle. It's an ecosystem buzzing with activity -- big fish gobbling up smaller ones, startups trying to survive -- and marketers can easily get disoriented.

Facebook has acquired The Find, a nine-year-old company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites.

Opening its first store-in-a-store in London this week, Google is looking to raise its already worldwide image.

Consumers today want it all. They want the convenience of shopping online but they crave the visual, emotional and physical experience of touching and trying on (or out) items, which they get by shopping in store.

Hold on to your hats, spending on marketing tech is about to take off -- $120 billion over the next decade, up from $1.2 billion today. At least that's what Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, sees when he gazes into his crystal ball.

Signs point to marketers opening up their wallets for emerging digital technologies, placing bets on measurable channels such as email, search and social media, shifting resources toward consumer-facing technology, and spending wads of cash on content creation and aggregation.

In a move to beef up its portfolio of analysis software and services, Microsoft is acquiring Revolution Analytics, a major commercial distributor of the R statistical programming language.

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted -- the question is, which half? That's the age-old question in adland. Now Oracle is hoping to help its customers answer that question with the acquisition of Datalogix, which collects offline consumer spending data in a bid to help online advertisers pick the right targets.

The search for game-changing technology capable of fueling growth in an uncertain economy is driving global tech mergers and acquisitions to a level not seen since the dotcom era.

IBM and Twitter have announced a partnership that will merge Twitter's massive flows of social media data with Big Blue's analytics software, including Watson.