This year finished with a bang in terms of M&A activity, with deals like Verizon’s (News - Alert) $130 billion buyout of Vodafone and Softbank’s $21.6 billion investment in Sprint raising the stakes. But perhaps the most talked about 2013 acquisition in tech was Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s (News - Alert) device business.

“It's encouraging to note that even with the sluggish pace of economic recovery and continued concerns over Washington’s fiscal crisis, very few surveyed individuals expect a slowdown in M&A activity in coming months, and most see a good chance of recovery to pre-recession levels within five years," said Morrison & Foerster’s Robert Townsend, co-chair of the firm’s Global M&A practice. “While deal volume remains at a relatively low level, a number of high-profile, high-priced acquisitions have occurred this year that suggest large corporations are again willing to turn to M&A to address fundamental competitive challenges.”

The number of tech transactions in the third quarter increased 97 percent over the second quarter, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, which said the average deal value increased to $440 million, up from $253 million in the first quarter and $433 million in the second quarter of 2013. The deal value in the third quarter – during which eight transactions in excess of $1 billion closed – totaled $27.7 billion, doubling that of the second quarter, PwC reported.

“After a struggling start in the first of half of 2013, the third quarter demonstrated robust growth in both volume and value of closed deals, to put technology M&A on an upward trajectory toward a strong finish to 2013,” said Rob Fisher, PwC’s U.S. technology industry deals leader. “Additionally, there were a significant number of large deals announced during the quarter. Private equity funds are increasingly active in the technology sector, and with growth a constant focus for technology businesses, we anticipate the abundance of cash at home and overseas held by corporate acquirers to spur deals in the months and quarters to come.”

And this week, the wheeling and dealing continued with a cornucopia of new acquisitions, investments and partnerships.

For example, Avago Technologies this week announced plans to lay out $6.6 billion in cash for LSI Corp. (News - Alert) This deal represents the second largest semiconductor-related deal of the year, topped only by Applied Materials’ $9.4 billion acquisition of Tokyo Electron.

LSI’s specialty is software and semiconductors that expedite networks and storage.  Avago has traditionally been focused on serving customers including Cisco, HP and Samsung related to solutions for the industrial sector, mobile devices, and network infrastructure.

“This highly complementary and compelling acquisition positions Avago as a leader in the enterprise storage market and expands our offerings and capabilities in wired infrastructure, particularly system-level expertise,” said Hock Tan, president and CEO at Avago, which predicts it will see annual revenues of $5 billion following the deal. “This combination will increase the company’s scale and diversify our revenue and customer base. In addition to these powerful strategic benefits, as we integrate LSI onto the Avago platform, we expect to drive LSI’s operating margins toward Avago’s current levels, creating significant additional value for stockholders.”

One of the more interesting deals of the week saw Intel announce its planned purchase of the small cell assets of Mindspeed Technologies, the rest of which is being bought by chip maker M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings.

The Intel-Mindspeed deal, which is expected to close in February, is interesting because it gives Intel a stronger play in the mobile operator network world and at the same time taps into the exciting software-defined networking trend, on which Intel already has been working with China Mobile and SKT.

Unified communications platform provider BroadSoft, meanwhile, has finalized the acquisition of German could-based UC provider finocom AG. This is good news for BroadSoft, as Germany represents Europe’s largest economy.

"We are excited by the growing demand for our BroadCloud capabilities throughout Europe. With the addition of finocom, we have significantly increased investment in our cloud infrastructure in order to bring BroadCloud to Germany initially and, longer term, throughout Eastern Europe," said Michael Tessler, BroadSoft CEO. "We are thrilled to have such an experienced senior executive team join us to scale our European operations. This team will ensure we are enabling service providers to quickly and cost effectively offer their enterprise customers a comprehensive UC solution."

In another cloudy deal, managed services provider InterCloud Systems Inc. revealed it is snapping up Integration Partners-NY Corporation. The acquired brings the buyer new enterprise and service provider customers.

A couple of tech’s most well-known names – Facebook and Yahoo! – also announced acquisitions this week.

Facebook made public plans to buy San Francisco-based SportStream.

The acquired, which launched for business in June 2012, caters to broadcasters and other content companies that want to aggregate, filter and display sports data in real time. The two companies had already worked together, as SportStream leverages Facebook’s Keyword Insights and Public Feed APIs in an analytics tool it offers to help content types track what’s hot in sports.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! has moved to buy PeerCDN, which claims it can reduce bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent. Obviously, this deal is about ensuring the company can quickly deliver content with a good quality of service. And that’s going to be more important than ever for Yahoo!, which is making some high-stakes content hires, including last month’s news that Katie Couric is leaving ABC to join Yahoo!

Speaking of Yahoo!, an article posted to Business Insider yesterday mentions that Yahoo had the second highest U.S. market share in the online ad space last year, but how Yahoo at this point ranks No. 4., which is below Microsoft.

“That’s pretty brutal,” writes Nicholas Carlson, “considering how low a priority online media is for Microsoft.”

Nonetheless, he wrote, Yahoo’s investments in Asian success stories Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan mean Marissa Mayer, who already has greatly improved morale at the company, is sitting pretty, at least for the time being. 

But make no mistake about it, mobile advertising is a big business, and getting bigger.

That helps explain some of the recent investments in this space.

For example, Moovit, which offers a social transit application, has raised $28 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

The 30-employee outfit, which has raised a total of $3.5 million, now offers the app in 100 cities, with the fastest adoption in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. The app, available for Android (News - Alert) and iPhone devices, leverages public transportation data and crowdsourced traveler information to offer commuters suggestions for the ideal routes to their destinations.

“The world is bending towards public transportation because there’s no choice, cities are too crowded,” said CEO Nir Eriz of Moovit, who whose app is used by hundreds of thousands of people daily.

The mobile ad space also saw at least a couple of interesting new partnerships this week.

Prescott-Clearwater Technologies and SinglePoint Inc. have joined forces to launch a mobile advertising platform. Clearwater brings to the table an automated IVR platform while SinglePoint contributes its mobile ad serving SMS solution.

“The potential here is huge for the company and its shareholders, as it not only introduces a new stream of revenues for the company, but it also allows us to continue to increase application abilities for our existing technology,” said Greg Lambrecht, SinglePoint CEO. “As well, the high call volume received by Prescott-Clearwater's IVR, including a high rate of opt-ins, positions Singlepoint to receive passive income on a regular basis.”

And Maybelline New York is working with messaging app company Line and online shopping logistics firm aCommerce to bring the cosmetics giant’s latest products to the Thailand market via Line-powered online discounts and flash sales. 

This specific campaign ran Dec. 16 through today, but opens the door to additional promotions leveraging the Line app, which has 20 million users.

Another hot area in mobile is machine-to-machine communications, also known as the Internet of Things, and when applied to certain aspects of business, referred to as the Industrial Internet. Cisco Systems recently predicted that by 2020 the IoT market will be valued at $14.4 trillion and power 50 billion connected devices.

GE is among the pioneers in the M2M space. As Carl Ford of Crossfire Media explained in the fourth quarter 2013 issue of TMC’s M2M Evolution magazine, at the heart of the GE strategy is the emphasis that big data comes from the intelligence of connecting devices and discerning patterns.

“This vision is not about e-readers, smartphones and the Internet of Things, it’s about the Internet of Making – or, as GE says, the Industrial Internet,” wrote Ford.

He added that GE’s Peter Evans, director of global strategy and analytics, and Marco Annunziata, chief economist and executive director of Market Insight, wrote a white paper that is a worthwhile read.

“In the paper they see the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution are the precursors to the Industrial Internet,” said Ford. “This third wave focuses on delivering efficiency and cost savings that are real and have direct impact on the bottom line. The metrics are about optimization, and GE finds that in its ability to manage machines. This augments its existing services and gives the company the opportunity to increase revenue and differentiate its products. Even if the improvement is around 1 percent in aviation, health care, oil and gas, power and rail the total value of savings is nearly $2 billion annually for over 15 years.”

It is this thinking that appears to be driving GE’s M2M acquisition strategy, and that strategy took another step forward this week as GE Ventures this week announced it is helping fund device security business Mocana (News - Alert) to the tune of $15 million, along with Shasta Ventures, Southern Cross, Venture Partners, Symantec, and Trident Capital. This follows by a month GE’s $30 million in Quirky.

"With the increasing proliferation of sensitive data from numerous types of machines and devices, security remains paramount,” said Brett May, Head of Ventures and Business Development, GE Software. “We are impressed with Mocana’s strong management team and their offering, which we believe will help to better secure the technologies and services we are building for our industrial customers."

While there was a lot of investment this week by tech companies, one major company – Alcatel-Lucent – moved to unload some of its assets. In the latest step related to its so-called Shift Plan reorganization, the company agreed to sell subsidiary LGS Innovations LLC to investor group Madison Dearborn Partners for around $200 million.