When activist hedge fund Elliott Associates made its unsolicited offer for business software maker Novell public on Tuesday, the thinking among analysts and reporters was that Elliott didn’t t really intend to buy the company, but rather force it into running a sale process and eventually finding a bigger tech company — like an HP or a Microsoft — to buy it. That may well be how it plays out, but Elliott spokesman Scott Tagliarino said that the firm is dead serious about its offer.

In fact, Elliott is no stranger to this type of deal, having made similar offers to a handful of small tech companies in the past. Typically, it owns large stakes in the companies it goes after. Last year, it was part of a private equity team that acquired MSC Software for about $360 million.

Palm Inc’s stock swooned this morning after the smartphone maker said it expects third-quarter and full-year revenue to be lower than expected because not enough people are buying its phones. In Palm’s exact words:

Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods.

A day after EU regulators cleared Microsoft and Yahoo’s search partnership, Yahoo Americas EVP Hilary Schneider went “Yahoo!” when asked what the alliance means for everyone. “The deal means more money,” Schneider said at the PaidContent 2010 conference in New York on Friday.

With the unified search audiences of Yahoo and Bing, Yahoo’s sales team can do its job better by making the consumer experience more relevant as well as  improving the return on investment for advertisers and publishers, she said. “The more search queries you have in a single marketplace, the more the (search) algorithms can refine themselves… (bringing) more revenue per search for the publisher.”

Many analysts and bankers who focus on the U.S. telecommunications sector believe that consolidation among wireless carriers is inevitable. There are too many wireless phone service providers already, and the top two — AT&T and Verizon — own the lion’s share of the market, which makes it increasingly tougher for smaller players to survive. Sprint acquired Virgin Mobile USA last year, Leap Wireless has hired advisers to explore a potential sale of itself (most likely to MetroPCS) and Deutsche Telekom is figuring out whether to sell or spin off its T-Mobile unit, which is the fourth largest U.S. wireless operator.

Bankers, telecom company executives and private equity types echoed these views at a Feb 9 event on deal-making in telecoms and media in 2010, organized by the Argyle Executive Forum. Yes, the U.S. wireless sector will likely see some deals born of necessity, but that doesn’t spell the return of M&A to the telecommunications sector as a whole, panelists said at the half-day event in New York. Rural telecoms companies could also see more consolidation, some of the panelists said, as these providers merge to cut costs and keep growing even as they lose traditional phone users.