Today on Silicon Valley Watcher Tom Foremski writes about The Dirty Little Secret of Silicon Valley's Startup Boom.

Thousands of startups are being launched with dreams of making a difference in the world. Yet Angels and VCs are selling them off to the big corporations in what are essentially engineering talent acquisitions.

Foremski's article seems to have been prompted by the Amazon acquisiton of Seattle's TeachStreet earlier this week. The e-commerce giant purchased the 5-year-old online marketplace that matches students and teachers and will be shutting it down the service in less than two weeks.

Telus Health Solutions announced this morning that they have acquired Wolf Medical Systems. The acquisition will create a new line of business within Telus Health Solutions called Physician Solutions. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Wolf Medical Systems is Canada’s largest and fastest-growing cloud-based EMR provider. Since 2010, over 11 million patient visits have been documented by physicians using Wolf EMR.

Intertainment Media announced today that it has made an investment in self-service ad platform Shiny Ads.

The strategic investment in Toronto's Shiny Ads provides Intertainment with an opportunity to more efficiently direct premium advertisers to their portfolio of online properties including itiBiti, Ortsbo, and Ad Taffy.

The initial early stage investment of $250,000 will provide Intertainment with an ownership stake in Shiny Ads and also provides the opportunity for Intertainment to increase its investment by an equal amount within six months at today's valuation. Intertainment Media will also have a seat on the Shiny Ads board.

The 15th Canadian Finacing Forum takes place in Vancouver this week on February 2nd and 3rd at the Fairmont Pacific Rim.

The Financing Forum facilitates relationship building between entrepreneurs and leading venture capital and corporate investors, paving the way for company financings that ultimately sustain economic growth through new business creation and development.

The presenting companies have been announced and the Information Technology Stream will include the following companies:

Siemens Canada has reached a friendly takeover deal with RuggedCom, an Ontario-based maker of smart grid technology. Siemens will pay $33 in cash per common share, making the deal worth roughly $382 million.

Only weeks ago, RuggedCom resisted a hostile takeover bid by Belden. The American company tried to steal Rugged for less than $280 million, but according to the Financial Post, the Ontario company "adopted a poison pill plan to allow management time to search for other offers." 

Calgary's Tynt Multimedia has been acquired by New York's 33Across in an all-stock transaction and it sounds like a perfect fit.

33Across uses proprietary technology to build a unique Brand Graph for each of its 350+ Fortune 1000 customers. 

Tynt sees 3 out of every 4 of the world’s unique Internet users to capture information on their interests and interactions online. This data represents Tynt's Interest Graph, and provides an accurate measure of consumer intent.

Tynt was co-founded by Derek Ball And Dayton Foster in Calgary of 2007. Over the past four years Tynt has raised $11.9 Million in venture capital from Panorama Capital, iNovia Capital, Greycroft Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, Disruptive Ventures, and W Media Ventures.

Since Techvibes starting covering Canadian technology and startup news five years ago there has never been an acquisition that has got as much attention as Vancouver's Summify. It seems every online news property has reported on Twitter's most recent acquisition and the post-mortem coverage continues.

Across the board, everyone seems to believe that the bright minds behind Summify will help Twitter solve the noise problem that has made it unusable for many. Your feed is a fire hose of chatter and critical links you would be interested in are all too often buried within seconds.