With your coffee this morning First Read brings you news that Blackstone may have to sacrifice fee revenue to win CalPERS pledge; BlackBerry 7 has been approved for Pentagon use; the anti-Facebook is getting bought and shut down and Amazon moves into high fashion.

If there was an umbrella message he offered it was this: never lose sight of company objectives. Any new product or feature has “got to show tangible wins very quickly,” he said.

eBay said Tuesday that it has agreed to buy WHI Solutions, which provides software and digital catalog solutions for auto parts distributors and retailers. Financial terms weren’t announced. Investors of Rye Brook, N.Y.-based WHI Solutions include Polaris Ventures, MidMark Capital, Viacom, Goldman Sachs and and Canopy Group. WHI’s offices will remain in New York, New Jersey [...]

After being carved from GSI Commerce in the wake of that startup’s sale to eBay, Boston-based online shopping site RueLaLa has received about $22 million of funding issued new stock options to a number of undisclosed parties, according to a federal filing. In March 2011, when eBay bought GSI Commerce, RueLaLa was sold back to GSI CEO Michael Rubin as part of a package that included more investment from eBay. A RueLaLa representative did not comment further.

VIEW THE FILING HERE.

eBay Inc. has acquired BillSAFE, a German provider of purchase-on-invoice technology. Terms of the deal were not announced, though eBay says it plans to combine BillSAFE with its PayPal service. eBay previously took a minority stake in BillSAFE in 2010, and now owns 100% of the outstanding shares.

Greylock Partners said Wednesday that Adam Nash will join the firm next month as an executive-in-residence. He will work on both the investing side and with company creation. Nash was most recently a vice president of product management at LinkedIn and served before that at eBay and Apple. BLOG POST Welcome Adam Nash! October 5, 2011 [...]

(Reuters) – U.S. prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into whether eBay Inc employees misappropriated confidential information from classified ad service Craigslist, according to a copy of a grand jury subpoena obtained by Reuters. The two companies have been feuding for years in civil court over allegations that online giant eBay used its Craigslist board [...]

Microsoft unveiled its biggest acquisition ever this week, agreeing to buy Skype for $8.5 billion.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the deal. Some have criticized it because of Skype’s lackluster financials. The Internet phone service provider is losing money. It recorded a net loss of $7 million last year on revenue of $860 million, despite the fact that its user base grew nearly 40% to 145 million, according to Thomson Reuters. Skype’s IPO has also lagged in registration since August. The sale to MSFT is about double the expected value of Skype if it had gone ahead with the IPO.

Skype’s investors have been chortling about how much they will gain on the sale. The company’s owners, led by Silver Lake, are expected to make more than 3x their investment.

(Reuters) – Microsoft is nearing a deal to buy Internet phone company Skype Technologies for more than $7 billion, and a deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The Skype deal would rank at or near the top of the biggest acquisitions in [...]

Acquisitions of venture-backed companies appear to be continuing at a decent pace, with the announcement yesterday that eBay has agreed to buy VC-backed mobile ad startup Where Inc. Given that the purchase price wasn’t disclosed, it’s unclear how Where’s backers will fare on the deal. The Boston-based company raised a total of $16.1 million over [...]