Filed under: Deals, Rumors, India

It would have been a blockbuster deal; that is, the merger of Bharti Airtel (India’s largest mobile operator) and MTN Group (the largest mobile operator in Africa). But, cultural and control issues intervened - and, the deal essentially died this week.

If the parties could have pulled off the transaction, the combined entity would have a market value of $70 billion.

True, it might be a missed chance to add big scale (which is critical in the mobile business). Yet, Bharti still has lots of growth left in India. Besides, the company needs to fend off the competition, such as Reliance and Vodafone Group (NYSE: VOD).

Interestingly, it looks like MTN is still in play (this is according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, which is a paid publication). For example, it looks like Reliance is in speaks with the company, for good reason: MTN has a fast-growing franchise in over 20 countries.

In fact, there could be a bidding war. Some of the other potential bidders include: Deutsche Telekom AG, VimpelCom and Etisalat.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the web Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, web 2.0

The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and your personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us. What’s Facebook’s goal with all of this? Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone speculates that Facebook is going to become the operating system of Web 2.0, sucking up the ideal features of other innovative sites.

Josh’s idea makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that the new Facebook profile design, scheduled to launch shortly, won’t let you hide your mini-feed when you’re looking at your profile. Facebook states this doesn’t matter, because hiding it for yourself never affected which stories others could see, and they want users to know what they’re broadcasting. If it doesn’t affect anything, why take away the choice to hide it?

We’ll engage in a tiny speculation of our own: by expanding the amount of info in the mini feed, and giving users as much exposure to it as possible, Facebook increases the value of advertising in the mini feed. They haven’t announced any formal plans along those lines, but their current moves (think Facebook Chat) seem to be targeted at increasing the time users spend on the site, which in turn increases its value to potential buyers. Just some mini-food for thought.

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