A variety of deals have been announced in the previous two weeks that deserve commentary.

CMP Media's acquisition of the trade show company Media Live had lots of interest for me since I once went head to head with their now defunct Comdex trade show in 2003. This is the company that completed the destruction of the once famous and important Comdex trade show. Two CEOs helped run Comdex into the ground: Fred Rosen and the Robert Priest-Heck. Neither understood what Comdex "was about" or what it needed to survive in the digital world. MediaLive still has the well regarded Interop trade show (which is but a sliver of what it was size-wise in the 1990s).

Another interesting footnote to the MediaLive deal is the financial disaster MediaLive turned out to be for the private equity side of the Thomas Wiesel investment bank based in San Francisco. I do not have the exact numbers but I believe Wiesel bought about $150 million of MediaLive bonds in 2003 thinking they had a financial bonanza. Little did they know that they had bought into a company that was worth a fraction of what they had invested. I have heard that CMP paid about $45 million for MediaLive. If true they over paid as well.

Warren Buffet Goes Internet

I was very excited to read today that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Company bought BusinessWire. I believe this marks Buffet's first buy in the Internet space? If so it is nice to have the Omaha financial master making his first Internet buy? Perhaps this could be the start of other Internet purchases?