Monday deal fever: Fraud Sciences, Trolltech, E-Dialog, Anywhere.fm all acquired

A number of companies decided to compete with DEMO for media coverage today by announcing some rather large acquisitions:

Paypal ponied up $170 million for Fraud Sciences, which prevents online fraud;

Nokia paid $153 million for Trolltech, which helps developers build cross-platform applications;

GSI Commerce gave $157 million for E-Dialog, an e-commerce company;

Finally, Imeem bought Anywhere.fm, an internet radio service.

Here are a few notes on each:

Paypal’s acquisition of Fraud Sciences was an all-cash deal for $170 million. The company had taken less than $20 million in funding to date, from investors Redpoint Ventures and BRM Capital. Fraud Sciences tracks online buyers to pin-point suspicious behavior, and is supposed to be particularly good at detecting fraudulent overseas transactions, a particular pain point for Paypal. (Press release)

Nokia also paid cash for Trolltech, which was a publicly-listed company on the Oslo Stock Exchange, but also had investors including Index Ventures. Simply put, Trolltech’s application development framework, called Qt, makes it much easier for developers to build applications that work across both PCs and mobile phones, as well as on the web. That sets Nokia up nicely to compete with Google’s Android, which we’ve covered here. (Press release)

Neither GSI Commerce nor E-Dialog is well known locally, but the acquisition price should turn some heads for its investors, which include Flagship Ventures and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The company had taken about $20 million in funding, according to Xconomy. (Reuters)

Imeem likely didn’t pay that much for Anywhere.fm, at least in comparison to the price of the above three acquisitions. Then again, for a three-man startup that came out of Y Combinator less than a year ago, with no venture funding, even a few million is significant. Anywhere.fm, which only ever took angel funding, has about 60,000 users and will continue to operate as its own service. It will likely benefit greatly from the business deals Imeem has made with the major music labels, covered in more depth here. (Press release)