DealZone

It took the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps to bring together the chief executives of Sanofi-Aventis and Genzyme  and pave the way for a $20.1 billion deal.

As the cream of the telecoms industry debates how best to make money from mobile data,Vimpelcom’s Alexander Izosimov  is alone in betting his balance sheet on it in unfashionable western Europe.

Chinese oil majors are set to accelerate their overseas buying spree in unconventional oil and gas assets, with an eye on technology key to help shift China’s reliance on coal to lower-carbon fuel over the next decade.

The bond of friendship doesn’t mean much when the government comes knocking on your door, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Warren Buffett will make his first trip to India next month and it could be a precursor to some deals, reports the Economic Times.

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.

Auto insurer Nationwide has joined businesses such as Kraft Foods, eBay and Amazon.com in developing applications that customers can access on Apple’s popular iPhone.

While Kraft’s iFood Assistant offers recipes and shopping lists for consumers, Nationwide’s application gives policyholders instant tools to help deal with some of the calls and paperwork that follow a vehicle bust-up, including access to tow truck service, and getting a claim started.

Nationwide says it is the first insurer to launch such an application, or “app” as iPhone tools are more often referred to.