Andrew Shuttleworth and Paul Papadimitriou organized an event cerebrating cherry blossom in bloom, Extreme Hanami and was crawling five spots in Tokyo.
Participants were walking and feeling the atmosphere, and reporting it on Flickr and qik. At final phase of the event, I joined the team at Yasukuni Shrine.
You can check out the event at Extreme Hanami.
We can find the financial term “taken over” in Japanese dictionary, but nor for its opposite meaning.
As for M&A meaning merge & acquisition, “merge” has feeling of neutral and the third-party view in it, and “acquisition” has a buyer’s perspective.
I think it is strange that both sides should be treated in equal but it is always mentioned with the buyer’s view.
A friend of mine, whom I used to get along with, Takeshi Izuka founded a company called “Digital Forest” ten years ago, and it was recently taken over by NTT Communications.
Usually bid price is not disclosed for private purchase, but the company made it in public and we learned it was JPY2.4B.
http://www.business-i.jp/news/ind-page/news/200903260023a.nwc
Congratulations!
For a company which raised fund money from VC companies, IPO and MPO used to be typical way to exit to the market. But in these days when market condition is truly bad, their way will be getting more natural. We have a number of examples that a venture takes over another venture in Japan, on the other hand, NTT-like traditional companies used to take over no start-up company.
The following picture is Mt. Fuji seen from Yamanaka Lake where I visited last weekend. It was sunny sky but zero degree Celsius and snowing powderly in the morning.
