EMusic.com, the leading seller of downloadable music, said Tuesday that it will acquire Tunes.com in a stock-for-stock deal valued at around US$130 million.
Tunes.com is the Chicago-based operator of RollingStone.com and DownBeatJazz.com. With a reported 28 million pageviews per month, Tunes.com is the third most-visited music network on the Web.
The deal is expected to close next quarter.
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Peacock to market: NBC Internet Inc., the television network's first publicly traded Internet company, is on the air. Well, actually, it's on the Nasdaq.
The company began trading Tuesday under the NBCI.O ticker symbol.
NBC Internet was formed by combining various NBC Web properties with the Snap portal and the Xoom e-commerce site. NBC is the largest equity holder, with a 47.3 percent share. Former stockholders of Xoom.com own 39.8 percent, while CNET, the former co-parent of Snap, holds 13.8 percent.
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Surf's up: Dell introduced its Webpc Tuesday, a new desktop computer priced at around $1,000 that the company says will have the user online in 10 minutes.
Aimed at the broad Web surfing market, the Webpc includes an "e-support" button that connects users with locally stored tech support pages. Access via chat to Dell support staff and a year's free Internet access are other features.
The 10-pound unit contains a 15-inch monitor and comes in blue, with orange, teal, red, or purple highlights.
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Land of the giants: AT&T said Tuesday that it won $510 million in contracts to build and maintain e-commerce network backbones for General Motors and Delphi Automotive Systems, a GM spinoff.
The contracts, $350 million and $160 million respectively, are five-year deals aimed at helping the companies to not only boost their e-commerce activities, but to streamline production operations as well.
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Another heavyweight partnership: Hewlett-Packard and Amazon.com have cut a deal that will have Amazon using HP technology in its Web infrastructure and offering HP products to its customers.
According to HP, Amazon's decision to partner with Hewlett-Packard was driven in part by analyst projections that demands on Amazon.com systems will triple this holiday season.
Reuters contributed to this report.
