Pageflakes, one of the companies I have had a chance to work with in the past year in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program, last week finalized its acqusition by LiveUniverse (a private company headed up by Brad Greenspan of MySpace fame). The acquisition was announced in mid-April of this year with financial details of the cash and stock deal with-held.

This is exciting times for the team, and I'm happy to see they found a synergistic acquirer that will give them additional firepower to fully develop and distribute their platform. Many of the blogs about the acquisition announcement hinted that the acquisition was not for a large sum and that Pageflakes has not gained as much market traction as its closest competitor, Netvibes. I can't say I know any details, however I do know personally that LiveUniverse was not the only suitor and that the other suitors for the company saw the widget platform as a highly strategic and desirable offering to have. Not to mention several people have asked me about how they can poach the technology team.

This underlines for me what is valuable when building a company. The company was attractive to LiveUniverse for not only its technology or market traction but also its team. Dan Cohen, Pageflakes' CEO is a seasoned veteran of startup companies as well as Google and Yahoo. Omar Al-Zabir, Pageflakes' CTO is a programming wunderkind at 24-years-old, Microsoft MVP and author of the O'Reilly book on Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 and I have met many of the scrappy folks that work with them at the young company pulling late hours to make it all happen. Dan will report directly to Brad Greenspan and Omar will work with Toan Nguyen, the original social networking architect of MySpace. When considering off-shoring a startup company's human resources, you should at least ask yourself if building a great team isn't a saleable asset in and of itself.

Also, both Pageflakes and LiveUniverse are based on the Microsoft platform so the integration of technologies made sense. Pageflakes and LiveUniverse started out with a business development/partnership-type relationship and very quickly the LiveUniverse team realized it would be more strategic for them to take Pageflakes directly into the fold.The first integration point will be with LiveVideo and Pageflakes' capabilities will allow the sharing and spread of video content through the 35 LiveUniverse properties as well as the web through "page-casting".

Just from that initial focus you can see that LiveUniverse will have greater virality of its content leveraging off of the Pageflakes widget platform and Pageflakes will have greater growth through exposure and marketing to the LiveUniverse sizable audience network. Brad gains a strategic and seasoned executive and entrepreneur in Dan and Toan and Omar will create considerable technology firepower for the combined company. Already with team + technology, Pageflakes + LiveUniverse is greater than two.