Speech Heads, if you caught my brother Adam B.’s article today, Nuance has acquired Jott for an undisclosed amount.

The deal is apparently a month old, and was only announced after a web page from Ackerly Partners, one of Jott’s investors, noted that the deal had been made in June. From there, according to Brier Dudley’s Seattle Times blog, the news burbled up on TechFlash.

The acquisition, however, signals that Nuance is serious about its place in the mobile space. As we’ve reported before in our review of Nuance’s voicemail-to-text offering, VM2T, and subsequent articles, the company’s entire business proposition is OEM and carrier-facing. Nuance has not made direct-to-consumer plays, letting its partners—many of them already big household names—face the public with their offerings. Jott, by contrast, makes direct-to-consumer bids.

Given all the fanfare about carrier deals from some of Nuance’s competitors, the acquisition of Jott has gotten some thinking that this might be a shift in direction for Nunace. Not so, though, says Mike Thompson, senior vice president for Nuance Mobile.

“Our primary customers are operators, OEMs, and enterprise organizations. That’s who Nuance sells software applications and services to, and that will continue to be the highest priority,” he says.

He adds, however, that Nuance does “do consumer work for a variety of reasons in certain parts of our business. Being very close to consumers allows for rapid innovation and lots of interesting things that you can learn.”

He also asserts that the purchase of Jott is not a reactive gesture to happenings in the mobile market at all, praising its new property as being strong and innovative. Nuance has no plans to scrap Jott’s direct consumer customers, nor have its strategy do an about face. Rather, it plans to build on Jott’s strengths with its own.

“As a small start up, Jott’s strategy was selling direct to consumers,” writes Datamonitor associate analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead in an email to Speech Technology. “Nuance will continue to support and target customers directly but its key focus will be in gaining carrier relationships. Carriers have a large, diverse user base and the ability to bring speech-to-text to many new customers.”

She points to Jotts offerings like Jott Assistant which handles voice reminders, texts, emails, etc. as value that Jott brings to Nuance.

“Nuance will gain a stronger position against growing competitors, such as SpinVox and Google Voice, by adding extra features like these to its service,” Brinsmead says. “Nuance is ramping up its mobile portfolio and aims to automate all mobile interactions with speech.”

So, a few days ago HP bought EDS. Today, CBS is buying CNET.com, a technology news and reviews Web site. In the battle of the acronyms, who will come out as the best acronym-laden acquisition? While the CBS/CNET deal is chump change ($1.8 billion) compared to HP/EDS ($13.9 billion), it’s still nothing to laugh at.

Why did CBS buy? Well, it may have a little something to do with getting more Internet traffic. And, as has been noted, advertising is one of the few mediums whose revenue is not being too harshly affected by the recession. And what’s one of the fastest-growing channels for advertising? Yep; the Internet. In addition, CNET’s traffic numbers played a big role in the deal.

According to a press release, the acquisition will make CBS one of the top 10 “most popular” Internet companies, with a combined 54 million unique users per month. Of course, we love nothing more than the totally weird PR-speak that goes into press releases, so I can’t resist this choice quote from CBS Interactive’s Quincy Smith:

“The core businesses of CNET Networks and CBS Interactive represent near perfect category symmetry in premium online content.”

That’s about five adjectives and one verb. Well done. In the meantime, I’m begging CBS to let me know when they will start airing a new season of the reality TV show Kid Nation. That was an hour of television whose content was both premium and near perfect. [TechCrunch]

So it turns out I could have cashed in my government bonds and bought EDS, guys. Because I own almost $14 billion in bonds, right? Sure. Anyway, HP announced today that it’s buying Texas-based Electronic Data Systems. You might recognize EDS from our own little magazine–EDS’ Alex Halikias writes a column for us called “Inside Outsourcing.”

The announcement means HP will be able to stake a claim in the technology outsourcing space, and directly compete with IBM. As more ginormous companies and government agencies turn to outsourcing tech projects, the market is expected to grow, according to analysts quoted in the news article. The acquisition means HP will now have 210,000 employees in 80 countries. Whoa — we have three editors at Speech Tech.

HP makes the big bucks in selling printers, PCs, and servers, but also made $16.4 billion in revenue in business consulting. The EDS acquisition will only further strengthen the company’s grip on business and technology consulting. We’ll keep you updated with news when we hear more. Also, EDS’ CEO, Ron Rittenmeyer, will stay on board with the same title. [MercuryNews.com]

In other news– Though Nuance ended its second fiscal quarter with revenue above expectations, the stock has been sliding. Goldman Sachs analyst Derek Bingham is quoted in the article as saying:

“Nuance’s March report showed that the company’s Network Speech business is not immune from macro slowing, consistent with slowdowns we’ve seen in other large-deal areas of software.”

The company’s stock is down almost 7 percent today. [Barron's]

[Image: LearnMergers.com]