Welcome to the travel edition of the Samadhi Brief…
Contributing Authors: John Freeman, Fred McClimans

TRIP up on M&A Buzz

Travel site TripAdvisor (NASDAQ:TRIP) closed yesterday's trading session +6.1% after news came out that its Chairman, Greg Maffei, touted M&A attractiveness as a basis for the stock having limited downside. Potential suitors listed were facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA). We strongly agree, and listed TRIP as one of our top 10 tech M&A targets for 2017 with Priceline (NASDAQ:PCLN), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and AMZN as the most suitable acquirers.

Nvidia & Microsoft GPU Accelerator; AMD & Microsoft Cloud; Qualcomm & Microsoft Cloud

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) spoke yesterday at the 2017 Open Compute Project U.S. Summit, revealing a number of partnerships that bolster its open source hardware initiative titled Project Olympus. Of note:

Microsoft has continually built an impressive cloud infrastructure that has lent it a dominant position, rivaled only by Amazon at present.

Source: Project Olympus

In case you missed it…

Facebook clones another SNAP (NYSE:SNAP) feature

FB has copied SNAP's stories feature on its Messenger app, which allows users to post pictures and videos that expire after 24 hours. Good for FB, but is there too much overlap between Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger looming?

CA (NASDAQ:CA) acquires app-security provider Veracode

CA is acquiring Veracode for $614m in cash, its third acquisition in the last five months (BlazeMeter, Automic Holding GmbH).