The Great Economic Crisis of 2008 affects companies capriciously, just as a tornado might flatten one home while leaving the neighbor’s untouched. The Crisis has decimated cash-starved small biotech companies for example, while their larger counterparts have sufficient revenues to weather the storm and Big Pharma—flush with cash as always—is hunting for bargains.

The same phenomenon is unfolding in tech. Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, HP and the other technology behemoths know the Crisis threatens smaller firms in the Valley, so they’re getting ready for a shopping spree the likes of which no one has seen in that sector since the dot com bubble burst in 2001.

“We are better positioned than our peers to do well in tough times,” Oracle’s Larry Ellison is reported to have said at his company’s October annual meeting.  “Acquisitions we have been looking at for some time are more attractive.”

But actions speak louder than words, so on a day the market tumbled 750 points, Oracle dropped $300 million cash to buy Primavera Software, a project-management company. HP followed suit by acquiring Lefthand Networks, a storage company for $360 million and Intel snapped up NetEffect for $8 million.

Many small tech companies are cash-strapped and don’t have a choice. “In this environment, it turns into a fire sale,” Emergence Capital’s Jason Green told Fortune magazine.

So what companies are most likely to be sold? It’s the ones with little or no revenue that are heading for a financing round just to survive, as well as later-stage companies that had planned for an IPO only to see activity in that space grind to a complete halt amid the credit squeeze.

Or, as Network Appliance CEO Dan Warmenhoven told Fortune, “Technology that would have cost me $100 million a year ago but might go for $11 million today. Deals like that.”

Senior managers at Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions are buying back shares of their company, believing it stands poised to benefit from a rapidly expanding US market for its flagship electronic medical record.

“Health care is one of the last industries on the planet to use information technology to improve quality,” Executive Chairman Michael Lawrie told the Wall Street Journal. 

Last week Lawrie paid $356,300 for 70,000 shares of his company. Joining him in the buyback were Chief Executive Glenn Tullman, Director Michael Kluger, and the President of Professional Solutions, Roger Davenport. They purchased 100,000 shares, 10,000 shares and 50,000 shares respectively.

Just last month, the board of Chicago-based Allscripts signed off on a merger with London-based Misys Healthcare to form the new entity. Misys had specialized in back-end functions such as billing, patient registration and scheduling. Allscripts had focused on the clinical medical record. The combined entity will have quarterly revenues approximating $400 million.

The activity comes days after the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it will provide bonus payments of up to 2% to physicians that e-prescribe drugs for Medicare patients.

Allscripts estimates that 25% of US physicians use electronic health records right now, and that utilization should double in 2 years.

The Allscripts web site asserts that 150,000 physicians, 700 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare providers in clinics, post-acute care facilities, and homecare agencies utilize Allscripts solutions.

President elect Obama supports the use of EMRs and related technologies that can purportedly improve quality and control costs.

A wealthy Norwegian dot-com boss turned fish farming entrepreneur thinks he can transform the country’s famous fjords into cod hatcheries just as human consumption of farmed fish is set to exceed that of wild fish for the first time.

Harald Dahl has already convinced Morgan Stanley and J. P. Morgan Chase to back his new company, Codfarmers. His backers apparently believe Dahl can overcome outbreaks of disease and finicky eating habits that have thwarted previous efforts to farm the iconic fish.

Today’s Atlantic cod market is worth about $1 billion, a fraction of its value before frightfully irresponsible overfishing slashed the global annual take from 1.8 million tons to 137,000 tons in just 40 years.

Codfarmers believes Norway’s deep fjords will facilitate waste disposal and lower exposure to fecal pathogens, the main reason why farmed cod hadn’t thrived in the past. Codfarmers has also developed techniques that increase reproductive efficiency and reduce harvesting costs.

At the moment, hearty, omnivorous salmon is by far the most widely farmed fish. But farmed salmon is not as tasty and contains fewer beneficial omega-3 fats than wild salmon, so it sells at a discount.

The economics are reversed for cod. Wild cod spends days in the hull of a boat before reaching shore, so it is not as fresh as the farmed variety. It sells for 20% less than farmed cod.

“Salmon used to be the party fish. Now it’s become an everyday fish. We want to make cod the party fish,” Dahl told the Wall Street Journal.

For 20 years Burger King left China’s exploding fast food market to McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, which operates Pizza Hut and KFC. Burger King joined its rivals on the mainland in 2005, but as recently as this April, it had only 12 storefronts in China.

Now, the King wants in on China’s $29 billion fast-food market and who can blame them?

This summer Burger King announced plans to open 300 outlets in China over the next 5 years. That still places it a distant third behind KFC, with 2,200 outlets and McDonald’s with 1,000.

And there’s a lot of work to do. For example, Burger King must get up to speed on Chinese food preferences. Chinese consumers it turns out, prefer chicken over beef-which is more or less what’s inside its trademark Whopper (known locally as huangbao, or Emperor Burger).

Burger King can thank its larger rival for some pioneering work in this regard. McDonald’s spent a ton of Yuan over the last decade convincing Chinese consumers that there are health benefits associated with eating beef (we promise to reveal these benefits once we learn what they are).

Even after tweaking its menu, the King knows it needs a killer strategy to make up for lost time. Right now its plan is to target younger, independent-minded consumers that want to distinguish themselves from older family members who prefer the “traditional offerings” served at Micky-D’s and KFC.

Hmmm…that might work, but a Cantonese version of “hold the pickles hold the lettuce, we don’t let special orders upset us,” wouldn’t be a bad backup.

Some scoffed when Yammer went live 8 weeks ago. With 3 million people Twittering away, did the world really need another microblogging platform?

No one’s laughing now, and it turns out the 2 companies could not be more different in many important aspects.

Twitter burst onto the scene 2 years ago and almost overnight created a new verb that entrenched itself in modern lexicon to nearly the same degree as “to Google.” “To Twitter,” users simply logon with a computer or cell phone and respond to the question, “what are you doing?”

Responses, or “Tweets” are limited to 140 characters. They range from profound and poetic to decidedly humdrum, like “I should have worn a sweater.” 

But despite Twitter’s enormous popularity and brand recognition, it has zero revenue. Not a cent. Not even from advertisements.

Twitter has argued that YouTube had little revenue when it sold to Google for $1.7 billion, and Facebook has a similar valuation on revenues of only $150 million. “Get the eyes first, worry about revenue later,” is the mantra. “Oh and by the way? Twitter registrations are up 600% this year.”

Which brings us to Yammer, the West Hollywood start-up that tweaked Twitter’s microblogging concept into an internal corporate communication tool and started generating revenue the day it went live.

As with Twitter, anyone can join Yammer for free, but they must have a corporate email account to do so.  Yammer users (Yammerers?) answer a Twitteresque question, “What are you working on” to communicate with company colleagues.  If the company wants to assume administrative control over the chatter, they pay Yammer.

It has been called Twitter with a business model, and it was enough for Yammer to secure the prestigious TechCrunch 50 prize last month. Yammer claimed that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

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Looking for companies positioned to weather the Great Economic Crisis of 2008? Pizaazz recently cited career networking sites like LinkedIn and Xing in this regard, but how about comScore, the Reston-based, publicly traded company that tracks consumer behavior on the Web?

comScore has created a large proprietary database by tracking the online behavior and monetary transactions of 2 million panelists. The panelists permit comScore to follow them around the Web in exchange for free Internet service or virus scans, and rights to participate in various contests. Panelists also participate in surveys which allow comScore to link information about attitudes and intentions to web search behavior. 

comScore then massages the data to create “insight” for several markets including automotive, financial services, pharmaceuticals and technology.

Its recent press releases convey the sorts of questions comScore can answer (and make money in so doing): “15 million people banked online in France in August,” “comScore ranks the top 50 US web properties for September,” “ More than half of Asia-Pacific internet users visited online gaming sites in August.”

The company’s reports have achieved sufficient cache to influence valuation exercises during M & A as was the case during the recent tie-up between Revolution Health and Waterfront Media. One time, they even affected the stock price of mighty Google. This occurred last February when comScore reported that paid search clicks, Google’s largest source of revenue, had tailed off around the Web. The search giant’s stock fell 5% on the news.

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Sermo, a Cambridge-based social networking site for physicians, has reached an agreement with Bloomberg that gives financial analysts real-time access to the opinions of Joe the Doctor and 90,000 of his colleagues who have joined Sermo’s community.

The deal was announced late last week. It calls for the formation of The Healthcare Exchange, a new service that will be offered exclusively to the 280,000 analysts and investors worldwide who pay a premium for access to the Bloomberg Professional service. The Healthcare Exchange allows analysts and investors to post questions about drug therapies, medical devices and health care trends directly to Sermo’s physician community.

As they do regularly on Sermo, physician members will provide raw, unfiltered, iconoclastic responses based on their own personal experiences. The new information source, the parties propose, should complement the more tightly scrubbed, buttoned-down information flow that currently emanates from the academic medical community, pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies, and government agencies.

“The Healthcare Exchange tears down the barriers between those who need information and those who have it,” said Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant, MD while announcing the initiative during last week’s Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. “No small group of opinion leaders can compete with the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’” 

The announcement follows by just over a week the IOM’s decision to honor John Wennberg for his pioneering work in the area of evidence-based medicine.

Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) has developed software that transforms cell phones into monitoring devices that identify audio streams from advertisements, TV shows or movies so that its customers can ascertain what you’re listening to and how it affects your behavior.

The souped-up cell phones can thus track the effectiveness of ad campaigns. For example, did you watch a movie after you saw its trailer on television?

The San Mateo-based IMMI is in start-up mode right now. It has enrolled 4,900 testing panelists in 6 markets. It pays each panelist $50 per month or offers free cell phone service in exchange for the panelists’ agreement to carry software-enabled phones wherever they go.

 IMMI’s technology can’t track the impact of Internet ads or print ads because they don’t involve audio. Still, IMMI has attracted attention from some big dogs. For example, GE’s NBC Universal uses IMMI to study how people watch sporting events like the Beijing Olympics and TV shows like Saturday Night Live.

Interestingly, IMMI recently reported that of the people who caught an SNL sketch featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, only one third watched the parody live on TV. The rest watched after the fact, either on a DVR or the Internet. 

By the way, IMMI assures you that your conversations are not being captured by their phones, since there isn’t a match in its coded data base for whatever it is you’re talking about. Matches only exist for audio from IMMI’s paying customers. Seriously.

Nowadays, consumers vent frustrations about companies using methods ranging from deviously clever to appalling. They post negative videos on YouTube, make critical comments on Twitter, or launch websites with domain names that leave no doubt what kinds of opinions will be found there. Gripe sites like starbucked.com and boycottwalmart.org see lots of volume, for example.

Companies targeted in this way can’t pull a video off YouTube or delete a Twitter post, but they can proactively purchase domain names that angry consumers might otherwise commandeer for the purposes of launching unseemly attacks.

FairWinds Partners, an Internet domain strategy firm recently studied the matter. They found that 20,000 sites ending with “…sucks.com” had been registered (that’s ten times more than the cohort ending in “…stinks.com” by the way).

And sure enough, among the Fortune 500 companies studied by FairWinds, 35% own their very own “…sucks.com” domain name. These include Wal-Mart, Target, Coca Cola, AMC Theaters and Southwest Airlines.

Surprisingly, Fairwinds recommends that companies choosing to scoop up their “…sucks.com” moniker should resist the temptation to bury it. Instead, Fairwinds implores companies to use these sites to elicit customer feedback.

Most of the above mentioned companies have not heeded FairWinds’ advice, although we’ve heard that AMC posts a satisfaction survey and Southwest directs visitors to its customer service page.

The Great Economic Crisis of 2008 has darkened the mood of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, according to a study published this week by Mark Cannice, director of the Entrepreneurship Program at University of San Francisco.

Each quarter since 2004, Mr. Cannice has asked VCs to assess on a five-point scale their own confidence about start-ups and entrepreneurialism generally for the ensuing 6-18 months. His just completed Q3 2008 survey revealed the VC’s confidence level to be 2.89 (with 5 being the most confident), the lowest ever recorded and the fourth new low in a row.

The VCs cited, what else, the impact of the Crisis on their business models and in particular their ability to cash in their investments. There have been only six IPOs this year for example. That’s the lowest number in 30 years. The prognosis for acquisitions is also gloomy since companies are cash-strapped and can’t secure loans easily.

Beyond this, it’s probably just a matter of time before institutional investors decide to allocate less money towards risky VC-type investments.

Mr. Cannice did note that some unperturbed VCs actually scored the current period a 5, the most optimistic rating possible. These people see high-tech entrepreneurs flooding their inboxes with superb ideas and plans, and point out that in the past, many successful start-ups began during economic downturns. 

What’s in their Kool-Aid?