Burger King Holdings Inc. recently closed a deal worth US$ 3.26 billion to sell itself to 3G Capital, an investment firm that enjoys strong ties with Latin America. The fast-food chain’s chairman and CEO, John Chidsey, stated that the deal will allow it to further and faster expand overseas.

Chidsey, soon to  hold the position of co-chairman of the company, said the $24-per-share deal will also bring in 3G Capital’s experience and contacts abroad. Chidsey also told The Associated Press that “Hopefully they’ll be able to even provide more of an accelerant to the fire.”

Over one third of Burger King’s locations are outside the U.S.,  growing as the company focuses on international expansion. 90 percent of last year’s new branches were build outside the U.S.

Chidsey declined to comment on specific strategies, deferring to 3G Capital. He also failed to comment on potential efforts to cut costs, including possible layoffs. Messages left for 3G Capital weren’t returned but the company told franchisees and investors in a letter on its website that it plans to invest in the brand and highlighted opporunities in Asia and Latin America, while maintaining Burger King’s headquarters in Miami.

Burger King has more than 12,100 locations worldwide  and constantly falls behind its far larger competitor McDonald’s Corp. It struggled to keep up with the rival during the economy’s wobbly state for the past two years.

The biggest problem facing Burger King is the high unemployment rate among its most important, but extremely picky, group of customers — young men between 18 and 34, whom it has targeted with big burgers like the 930-calorie BK Quad Stacker and edgy ads featuring the creepy King character.

When you are a groovy new web product, it is beyond doubt that you be subject to somewhat ‘intimidating’ imitators. But, start-up Groupon, has brilliantly taken advantage of the situation.

Recently, a considerable amount of companies have been cloning Groupon’s core feature set, and have been grabbing shares of Groupon’s US market. More so, international clones started rising and imitating the Groupon model around the globe.

Groupon agreed that these companies’ infrastructure in valuable, and decided to buy them. In may, it acquired its European clone ‘Citydeal’ and by so has accelerated its expansion into European markets including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden, Norway and Belgium.

After expanding in the Americas and Europe, Groupon decided to take on clones in Japan and Russia. The company bought a controlling stake in both Qpod.jp (Japan) and Darberry.ru (Russia) for undisclosed amounts, making Groupon’s reach worldwide. The companies’ names will be changed to “Groupon”. Each company’s founder will continue to lead it under the new Groupon name, and the sites’ branding and design will be aligned with that of Groupon.

When all is done and settled, Groupon will have operations in 230 markets and 29 countries and is predicted to reach as much as 13 million subscribers. With this kind of hostile expansion, Groupon has over passed a great deal of obstacles to its growth. According to CEO Rob Solomon, Groupon is nows working with companies that are already “the best in their markets.”

One can imagine Groupon’s investors (mainly Digital Sky Technologies of Zynga and Facebook fame, whose collaboration in Groupon’s Series C left the company valued at $1.35 billion and ready and covered to acquire any number of competitors) are thrilled.

Hulu, an online video service that offers hit TV shows, could be transformed into a publicly traded internet company by this fall.

The New York Times reported, quoting “people briefed on the matter”, that Hulu is considering an IPO, with several investment banks valuing the joint venture created in 2007 between News Corp, Walt Disney, NBC Universal and Providence Equity Partners at over of $2 billion.

After recently adding a “Hulu Plus” service which offers stronger library content and applications for the iphone and ipad, Hulu’s revenues are approaching yearly revenues of USD 200 – 250 million. Following both Demand Media and Skype announcing their plans to go public, Hulu’s move is yet another big internet IPO recently revealed.

No further details were immediately available on Hulu’s IPO plans.

As part of its expansion strategy, Facebook recently acquired Chai Labs, a startup that helps companies build search-friendly websites focused on specific topics.

According to BoomTown, the estimated cost of the acquisition was figured at around USD 10 million. BoomTown also alleges that the acquisition happened to take advantage of Chai Labs’ talent, not products or services.

Chai Labs was established by ex-Google AdSense executive Gokul Rajaram, and its advisory board and investors include LinkedIn (LinkedIn) Chairman and PayPal alum Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, and Google Ventures partner Joe Kraus, previously CEO of JotSpot. Chai Labs’ website claims that Associated Content, the Travel Ad Network and NBC Local are among its clients.

Unlike other web publishing companies, Chai Labs specializes in semantic search technologies. The company claims that these technologies make it easy and simple for consumers of editorial content to find information within a specific vertical like travel or local news. It is not yet clear on how Facebook plans to cash in the expertise that it got ahold of, since it is doing just about everything now.

Other recent acquisitions include local recommendation service NextStop, photo-sharing service DivvyShot, and Sharegrove, a platform for sharing content and messages in real-time.

Earlier this week Google announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire ITA, a 14-year-old Boston-based software company specializing in organizing airline data that includes flight times, availability and prices. The purchase price was said to be $700 million in cash, subject to adjustments.

With this purchase, Google said it plans to create flight search tools directly on Google.com, a move that could challenge the $132 million a year air travel industry, as well as upset Microsoft, its rival. D.C. Denison of The Boston Globe said, “Nearly 50 percent of airline tickets are purchased online. Microsoft’s Bing search service, which competes with Google, already has a prominent travel area that uses ITA software, and features tools like ticket price predictors.”

Providing such information directly is a new move for Google, a significant step in how it has traditionally conducted business so far.

Google declined to predict what kinds of services might result from the acquisition. In a conference call with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, she talked about being able to answer more open-ended travel queries, such as “Where can I get within seven hours and within this price?”

Antitrust regulators still need to review the deal however, yet Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was quoted as saying:  “We expect this will go through.”

In a bid to expand its online business analytics, IBM announced on Tuesday its plans to acquire Coremetrics, a leader in web analytics.

Coremetrics, a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, will help IBM in gaining the ability to help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks as well as online media sources through a cloud-based delivery model. They, in turn, will incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns.

Today, Coremetrics delivers web analytics capabilities to more than 2,100 global brands across a wide range of industries including but not limited to retail, financial services, travel and hospitality and education. Some notable Customers include Bank of America, Holiday Inn, PETCO, Office Depot, Victoria’s Secret, and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

IBM’s senior vice president and software group executive Steve Mils  explained how a joint company could better address the needs of customers who are increasingly looking to increase their online sales and marketing:  ”Banking, travel and transportation… these aren’t traditional retail but people these days do all those things online,We think we can make it a much bigger business as part of IBM.”

The deal is said to close in the 3^rd quarter of 2010.

Just the other day, GM announced their plans to commit $100 million to form a new Venture Capital firm as an effort to seek new technologies and give them the extra competitive edge.

“We are constantly looking for ways to deliver the best technology for our customers, our goal is to nurture these innovative technologies to help bring them to market, and to ensure our customers have access to the best technology available.” Said Stephen J. Girsky, G.M. Vice Chairman, in a statement as he announced on Friday that GM are forming their own venture capital firm (General Motors Ventures).

“It allows the company to move quickly to make small investments in companies where we want to pursue a long-term technology that we think has potential for our customers,” said their spokeswoman Ms. Childers-Arb.

Since 2008, General Motors has held equity stakes in two companies that are working on ethanol fuel; the size of the stakes has not been revealed to the public.

As a direct result of filing for bankruptcy last year, GM is 61% owned by the federal government, but has been slowly showing signs of recovery. Its first quarter earnings were reported to be $865 million last month, and it repaid it’s $6.7 billion owed to the US government in April.

President Obama has renewed his push on to persuade Congress to pass a package of small business initiatives, including a plan to bolster small banks’ lending with $30 billion.

The plan is looking to target the many small businesses reported to have trouble getting credit during the worst recession in decades. Obama has been criticized for not doing enough to generate job growth, proposed the plan back in February. The proposal has faced questions as to whether or not it would work.

The package also includes $2 billion to support programs at the state level that support private lending and would establish a $30 billion fund to boost lending to small businesses looking to expand their operations.

Case in point: Miss Candace Fleming, a highly successful and educated entrepreneur who has been trying to raise money for her start up company Crimson Hexagon that she co-founded in 2007, only to face sexist remarks from various businessmen. Getting taken seriously, as a woman, was proving to be harder than she ever imagined.

Of the 30 venture firms she pitched, she finally received the funding ($1.8 Million) from angel investors including Golden Seeds, a fun that emphasizes in start-ups by women.

Miss Fleming had the following to say about her experiences: “I didn’t know things like this still happened, but I know that, especially in risky times like the last couple years, some investors kind of retreat to investing via a template.” A company owned by a woman, she added, “is just not the standard template.”

Apparently, sexism in Silicon Valley, as well as other hubs such as New York and Austin, exists more than people actually think.  According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, women own 40% of private businesses in the United States, yet they create only 8% of venture backed tech start-ups. If you add race and cultural background to this mix, the result is even more worrisome. Very small percentages of workers in IT are African-American, Asian or Hispanic, and that number gets even smaller for women.

However, women outnumber men at elite colleges, law schools, medical schools and in the overall work force.

Ms. Padnos, who recently founded Illuminate Ventures said, “When you have gender diversity in an organization, you have better innovation, and I don’t know where innovation is more important than in the high-tech world,”

Many firms like Illuminate Ventures, along with nonprofit organizations such as the National Center for Women and Information Technology, and Springboard Enterprises, are trying to fix this problem by raising awareness, mentoring entrepreneurial women and assisting in introducing them to investors.

Monica Morse, a trustee at Astia, had the following to say about this situation: “The good news is that Silicon Valley will see this change, they will chase the person they think will make the money, regardless of whether they wear a skirt.”

Cerebrus Capital Management, one of the world’s leading private investment firms, agreed to buy defense contractor DynCorp International Inc., a global government services provider in support of US national security and foreign policy objectives, for about $1 billion. The purchase price would be $17.55 per share – a 49% premium to the April 9/10 close of $11.75, and about 12.4 times the FY 2010 consensus forecast of $1.41 earnings /share.

DynCorp has been plagued with much controversy over the years for its assignments in Iraq, but has nonetheless continued to win contracts from the federal government.

In a statement just the other day, William L. Ballhaus, DynCorp’s chief executive, said:  “I believe that under this partnership with Cerberus, DynCorp International will be able to build on our extensive heritage and successful performance to continue to achieve our growth objectives,” “Importantly, this transaction is a major milestone for DynCorp International’s continued leadership in serving our customers and supporting U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.”

In recent times as credit markets are back to better times, banks have resumed making loans to finance private equity firms, bringing back a fee-laden business. Cerebrus has received financing commitments from Bank of America, Merril Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Barclay’s among others.

DynCorp’s advisors were Goldman Sachs as well as the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, an American law firm and one of the top 100 largest law firms by revenue.

Cerebrus was advised by Evercore Partners, a leading advisory and investment firm as well as the law Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Jenner & Block.