■ Google recently acquired startup company Clever Sense, developer of a local recommendations application it calls a “Pandora for the real world”. Personalized mobile recommendations figure to play an important role in the continued development of Google’s local products, and Google Plus is also likely to play a prominent role in this initiative.

■ Glam Media recently announced the acquisition of the online platform for building social websites, Ning. Additionally, Ning co-founder and chairman Marc Andreessen has joined Glam Media’s board of directors. Glam Media is now the second largest social media company in the world with more than 250 million monthly unique users and more than 100,000 publishers and content creators. Ning will continue to operate its subscription services for Ning Creators as a new business unit within Glam Media.

■ Facebook has acquired location-based startup Gowalla, presumably to bolster its new Timeline feature. The Austin, Texas-based Gowalla team was expected to close its doors in January and join Facebook’s design and engineering operations in Silicon Valley.

■ SAP America, Inc., has entered into a definitive merger agreement with SuccessFactors, the market-leading provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions, pursuant to which a subsidiary of SAP would offer to acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of SuccessFactors for $40.00/per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of approximately $3.4 billion. The acquisition will add SuccessFactors’ team and technology to SAP’s powerful cloud assets, accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure.

■ Meanwhile, SuccessFactors has completed its acquisition of Jobs2web. With Jobs2web, companies can drive social and mobile recruiting programs across all potential recruiting channels like Bing, Facebook, Google, Indeed, Jigsaw, Juju, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, Zoominfo, and other communities. Jobs2web works with all major recruiting vendors and ATS systems and will be immediately integrated with SuccessFactors’ Business Execution applications.

■ Software-as-a-service provider of travel, loyalty and payment solutions, ezRez Software, Inc., recently announced its acquisition of Topguest, a San Francisco-based startup company providing loyalty and social network engagement products to travel companies. Topguest enables members of leading travel loyalty programs, such as United MileagePlus, Continental One Pass, IHG Priority Club and Hilton Honors, to earn reward points for geo-located check-ins via their mobile devices.

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