With media titans GE and Vivendi still negotiating a deal to bring cable operator Comcast into a mega-media joint venture, a management move at DirecTV is giving dealwatchers a fresh programming alternative.

Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew report the appointment of PepsiCo veteran Michael White (pictured below), who has no experience in pay TV, as DirecTV CEO is being read as a sign the company's parent, Liberty Media, just wants a baby-sitter until its sells the operation in the next couple of years.

Telecom leaders Verizon and AT&T approached Liberty earlier this year, they report. Both have cross-marketing deals with DirecTV and would leapfrog the rest of the market with the addition of DirecTV's subscriber base. But fears of insurmountable regulatory resistance put those talks on ice.

Liberty Media shareholders are set to vote this morning on a plan to split DirecTV from Liberty Entertainment -- a move that Wall Street believes could pave the way for a telephone company to put in a bid for DirecTV, leading to a similar bid for smaller rival Dish Network.

If Comcast gets its content pipeline connected to NBC Universal, the pressure on the telcos to boost subscribers could get them to test the regulatory waters again.

Maybe it's time to add a new weapon to the old M&A arsenal of poison pills, dawn raids, and white knights -- the corporate blog. You could call it the WordPress Hug.

Late on Monday, Cisco's Ned Hooper used the company's blog to insist it had offered "a very good price" for Tandberg, after some shareholders of the Norwegian videoconferencing company said the price was too low. (See his full post here.)

The "Driving Conversations" blog of General Motors Europe has also been a source of news on the long-running (and now abandoned) talks to sell Opel, hosting posts from GM's chief negotiator, John Smith. (See some of his posts on the topic here.)

So could blogging become a major channel of communication on M&A transactions? Big corporations have enthusiastically adopted it for other uses- for example, "Randy's Journal", a Boeing blog, has a following in the industry and among aeroplane enthusiasts.

But it is hard to believe this trend would be welcomed by some financial regulators -- like the UK's Takeover Panel, which banned advertising during takeover battles more than 20 years ago.

A string of Yahoo sales, engineering and product executives took the stage on Wednesday in the company's first full-day briefing with analysts since May 2006, all with a mantra that came down from on high: "Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said CEO Carol Bartz.

With page views increasing, Carl Icahn having drawn in his horns, and the company extending a deadline for finalizing a search agreement with Microsoft, the time was right for a love-in.

Finance Chief Tim Morse said Yahoo expects to achieve operating margins between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2012. After the third quarter's "pathetic" 6 percent, shareholders would certainly consider that a more respectful performance.

Another way to show their respect would have been to give specific details on the engineering involved in the promised prestige. Executives said Yahoo would achieve the new margin targets by accelerating its revenue in the next few years, but demurred from providing a specific revenue growth target.

The company said it would invest in editorial staff to produce more original features, and tweak its online products to keep users on the site longer and boost advertising revenue.

Hiring more staff and investing in ad search wizardry will certainly add to costs, so the need for a little more Internet alchemy could require a leap of faith to engineer the recovery in esteem Yahoo hopes to achieve.

Xerox, which said early Monday morning it will buy Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion, has had its eye on the IT services company for at least two years, but talks only began toward the end of the first quarter of 2009, several people familiar with the matter told Dealzone. Blackstone, which advised Xerox, worked with the company on this over the past 18 months, in addition to making the introductions earlier this year, according to one source.

Talks grew hot and heavy over the summer, especially as the credit market conditions improved, a second source said. Xerox has committed financing of $3 billion for this deal, which is being arranged by JPMorgan, so the deal only began to look like a real possibility once the financing side was sorted out.

ACS, which competes with other technology services providers such as Computer Sciences Corp and Accenture, is an attractive company because of its recurring revenue business model. It's been an especially alluring target for private equity buyers, with Cerberus having offered to buy it for $62 a share in 2007. Cerberus withdrew its offer citing the credit crunch and ACS management's refusal to engage with them. TPG was also interested in ACS about five years ago, the second source added.

Buyout firms didn't lose the opportunity to sniff around at ACS this time around either, the sources said, although it's not clear if the ACS management asked its bankers to run a formal sale auction.

"Every PE firm in the world that could raise the debt was kicking the tires on this one because of the cash," said the third source.

So after doing the M&A dance for months, why did the companies rush to announce the deal on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday? Apparently, word got around on Sunday that Xerox was preparing a significant announcement, and some reporters were tipped off about it, two of the sources told Dealzone. But the board only ended up meeting late at night to approve the deal, and so it was considered "safe" to hold on to the announcement overnight, but not through all of Monday!

Update: From my colleague Franklin Paul, who said Xerox CEO Ursula Burns apologized to the audience on the ACS deal call "for our need to do this announcement on Yom Kippur." "It was certainly not our intention," Burns said, but they wanted to seal the deal before it began leaking. Certainly they did, given that Xerox has coveted ACS for a long time and probably would have hated to see the deal botched by rumors before the two sides signed on the dotted line.

If you want to take a bite out of Apple’s piece of the staggeringly huge (but difficult to quantify in $$$ terms) smartphone market pie, you’d better either have the magical new “thing” or be willing to spend to buy it.

As Anupreeta Das reports, Palm – one of the stalwart originals in the mobile handset space -- has remade itself into a terrific target with the success of its Pre. Palm’s stock got a jolt this week on talk that Nokia could be considering a bid. But as she explains, Palm may prove to be too pricey a purchase, even for those with deep pockets.

Since introducing the Pre, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola have been mentioned as possible suitors. If one of these cash-rich companies was to bid for Palm today, it would be targeting a stock that has quadrupled this year. Complicating matters, “details on how many units it has sold are skimpy, making it difficult to value the success of Palm's turnaround story,” she reports.

Palm's market capitalization is $2.4 billion. Based on the average 34 percent premium that technology, media and telecommunications companies have been sold for this year, according to Thomson Reuters data, this means a price tag of about $3.2 billion.

Dell is already in the early stages of buying up Perot Systems, but will still have nearly $7 billion in cash on hand should it choose to go on a spree. Microsoft, while a cagey customer, as shown in its dealings with Yahoo, has buckets more. For big tech players, the price itself is not the problem.

“To them, Palm is a thousand-dollar used model locomotive. Now you have to buy the other cars, and the tracks, and fake trees, etc. You have enough to pay for it, but you don’t even know if it works properly,” said a guy here at Reuters when the subject was being kicked around.

With something like $10 billion in cash, Dell wouldn't seem to be stretching itself to buy Perot Systems. But the $3.9 billion it is offering represents a 67 percent premium, so Dell shareholders should probably ask themselves whether Perot's business is worth so much.

Perot is a business service company with a big component dedicated to health information. It was founded in 1988 by Ross Perot -- the same Ross Perot who ran for U.S. president as an independent in 1992 and 1996.

Dell's cash pile is burning a hole in its pocket. It has said it wants to step up acquisitions, and services businesses are a logical target area, with higher margins and steadier revenue than the business of building and selling computers that made Michael Dell (pictured in shades above) the tech mogul he is today.

But why does Perot command such a hefty premium? "We think this acquisition is expensive," and even pricier than Hewlett-Packard's purchase of EDS last year, said analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research. She says the cost-saving benefits are few. Even Dell says cross-selling benefits won't materialize until 2012.

"Dell investors should be outraged at paying such a large sum for such a small, vertical operation," said Douglas A. McIntyre of Wall St 24/7.

Nobody can question Eastman Kodak's intention in raising some $700 million. Getting a commitment from private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to buy up to $400 million of its debt is also a perfectly logical step for the old-economy stalwart as it lumbers into the digital age. What KKR is thinking is another matter.

KKR says the investment reflects its belief in Kodak's strategy. They're also getting warrants in Kodak to purchase up to 53 million shares of its common stock. The Wall Street Journal says KKR could end up owning close to 20 percent of the company.

The 24/7 Wall St blog notes that the fall in Kodak's share price following the news shows the market isn't blindly convinced of KKR's intelligence. But Kodak's bonds got a boost, if for no other reason than there's a buyer out there.

Nobody has offered much in the way of explanation as to why KKR sees potential in Kodak. Boosters may say most of the company's restructuring is behind it, but that doesn't answer the more important question of what lies ahead. Any bright ideas?

Adobe Systems, the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat, hopes its $1.8 billion purchase of fast-growing business software maker Omniture will turn around its declining sales.

Adobe reported lower quarterly sales and profit after unveiling the deal. A snazzy new acquisition is a welcome distraction.

The purchase will give Adobe a new stream of revenue to offset a decline in customer upgrades of older versions of its programs. Omniture charges customers fees based on monthly web site traffic, so it is less sensitive to economic swings than Adobe. "There is no way Adobe can grow organically. This is a smart move," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

But not everyone is convinced. Larry Dignan at ZDNet said he slept on it and, at 4:52 this morning, said in his Between the Lines column that he couldn't see the logic. He quoted a couple of negative analyst notes.

"Adobe's Omniture purchase isn't a slam dunk. The burden of proof regarding synergy, product roadmaps and (CEO Shantanu) Narayen's vision where analytics meets content creation rests with Adobe," he wrote.

Walt Disney's $4 billion offer for Marvel Entertainment would give it more than 5,000 comic book characters, including such mighty heroes as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four. Disney's Bob Iger told CNBC that the expanded roster will help bring more boys to the home of the Magic Kingdom, where Snow White, Cinderella and the Little Mermaid have long reigned supreme.

The cash and stock deal values Marvel at $50 per share, or a premium of 29 percent to Marvel's closing stock price of $38.65 on Friday. The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies, and since Marvel's CEO, Isaac Perlmutter, is also the largest shareholder of the company, it's likely a done deal.

Marvel's second quarter was a mighty one. It beat market estimates on strong DVD and pay TV sales of "Iron Man," sending its shares to an all-time high. This year has been a lull for Marvel, with no new film releases due until 2010, when Iron Man 2 hits screens. Thor and the first Avenger movie, as well as Sony-produced "Spider-Man 4," are slated for a 2011 release and an "Avengers" sequel is due in 2012.

Is this a game changer for Disney's foes? Marvel rival DC Comics, with its stable of Batman, Watchmen and other, darker comic champions, is already a part of Time Warner. For the fantastic leap comic books have made to the big screen, this could be the last hurrah.

As centers of innovation go, there are worse places to place a bet on the past repeating itself than California's technology hub. Looking beyond the Internet, housing and credit bubbles, it's still the preferred playground of such leading financial weathervanes as venture capitalists, gizmo nerds and software studs.

Perhaps Wall Street, searching for reasons to remain optimistic about the market's summer rally, should take heart from the spate of articles painting pictures of green shoots all over Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal's Deal Journal notes that tech IPOs are staging a comeback, and asks if its time to party like it's 1999?

Our reporting shows that investors, encouraged by a growing number of acquisitions and public stock flotations in the past few months, are keeping a close eye on a coterie of promising startups in Silicon Valley. David Lawsky identified six privately held companies as the ripest for acquisition or readiness to go public, out of 34 cited in industries ranging from alternative energy to social networking.

The top four are business social network LinkedIn, solar panel maker Solyndra, smart grid company Silver Spring, and Zynga, a casual games company whose products run on social networks like Facebook. Two others are Guidewire, which makes software for property and casualty companies, and LiveOps, which runs call centers using private contractors who work from home.

But he reports that the Silicon Valley Six say they intend to keep growing organically rather than agreeing to be acquired or go public during the recession. Recession or no, there is clearly plenty of money looking for a ride. That's the thing about bubbles; they tend to be more fun when you catch them early.