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If anyone knew the real reason behind the much-hyped kerfuffle a few weeks ago between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his would-be OpenWorld conference guest, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, she kept it to herself rather skillfully. As it turns out, Oracle executives held an all-hands-on-deck meeting late last week; and this morning, the obvious Easter-egg-shaped clue everyone missed emerged as if it had just been laid: Oracle has entered into an agreement to purchase Salesforce's fiercest competitor in the CRM space, RightNow.

Last Monday's suspension by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission of the 180-day countdown clock for the review of AT&T's proposed purchase of wireless spectrum from Qualcomm, was another signal that regulators for the current administration may not be as permissive about acquisitions as those for the prior one. Now, as The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday afternoon, AT&T has hired Bank of America to help it consider, and perhaps execute, a sale of certain assets, in hopes of appeasing regulators who continue to look askance at its proposed acquisition of the U.S. assets of T-Mobile.

Qualcomm reached an agreement with AT&T to sell its remaining share of the D block of 700 MHz spectrum in the U.S. last December. In an effort to convince regulators they may be holding up the innovation process, late Monday, Qualcomm issued a statement on behalf of the corporation that made a bold, but unusual, claim: It would only have the resources to build services such as FLO TV using that spectrum, if it could sell that spectrum to AT&T first.

You know a company is all grown up and ready to take on the world when it makes its first acquisition. Well, fine, maybe raising $10.6 million last January counts too, but today leading group messaging app GroupMe announced that it had acquired small application developer Sensobi for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition will bring Sensobi's co-founders onto the GroupMe team and likely include incorporating Sensobi's contact ranking and alert technologies into GroupMe, which hints at some interesting potential for the group messaging app.

Google has acquired PushLife, a mobile music application which allowed users synchronize tracks on their desktop computers with their mobile phones. Supported devices included those from Nokia, BlackBerry and any running Google's Android mobile operating system. The deal comes ahead of Google's expected launch of Google Music, a service Google demonstrated at its developer conference last year, and is now reportedly undergoing in-house testing.

But if Google Music is so close to launch, after having been in development for over a year, why is Google just now buying the technology of a small-time competitor in this space? What hole does PushLife fill?

The Israeli mobile startup Snaptu confirmed on its blog today that it has been acquired by Facebook. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed for Facebook's first acquisition outside the U.S., but the sum was pegged at $70 million.

Snaptu builds applications for feature phones, and the startup worked with Facebook to develop its feature phone app, released at the beginning of this year. That app expanded Facebook's mobile app availability beyond just smart phone users, bringing a Facebook app to over 2500 different mobile devices.

There are already plenty of places to get licensed content streamed online - from Netflix to Amazon Video On Demand - and equally as many to stream video live. So where can YouTube go next with user-created online video?

YouTube's next step is just that - YouTube Next. The Google-owned video network acquired NextNewNetworks, a video network with more than 2 billion views and 6 million subscribers.

One of my favorite group messaging apps, and my (former) vote for the app to take the cake this year at SXSW, announced this morning that it has been acquired by Facebook.

According to a Facebook spokesperson and the company's announcement, the app Beluga "will continue to function as it does today." That statement is made with a huge qualifier, however - "for now."

Yesterday, TechCrunch broke the news that Google had acquired Twitter sentiment analysis and recommendation engine fflick. Today, YouTube posted its blog that it, a subsidiary of Google, had actually done the acquiring.

According to the post, YouTube will be using the "technical talent, design instincts and entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team" in its effort to roll out more features "that help you enjoy and discover new videos to watch."

Independent software company Attachmate will purchase Novell for $2.2 billion the companies announced today. CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of companies lead by Microsoft, put up $450 million of the $2.2 billion in exchange for 882 patents from Novell, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley discovered. Microsoft isn't talking about what patents it's purchasing from Novell.

We were just finishing up a post about Oracle's acquisition plans when the news comes in that Salesforce.com has acquired Activa Live, a SaaS messaging platform designed for customer support through a chat environment.

This is an interesting acquisition and shows what a heated space it is for providing more capabilities to tie customer support environments to the social Web.

It clearly shows that Salesforce.com is putting its investing strength into technologies that enhance the social layer with real-time communcations.