Global software giant Symantec has announced that it will acquire Australian software company PC Tools.

That’s great news for founders Simon Clausen and Peter McKow especially as the pair started the company in 1998 and bootstrapped it rather than take venture capital.

That must have been a hard decision with all the money flying around in the dot-com days but it’s paid off now, even without specifics of the purchase price or the deal having been made public.

The company’s revenue for last year was around $50M. I’ve always understood the rule of thumb to be that software companies are worth 1-2x annual software revenue so the purchase price would probably have been round $50-$100M.

Not a bad payday.

That might also be really good news for the local startup scene as hopefully it means we have 2 new high net worth individuals, with domain expertise, who may invest (e.g. as Angels) in local tech startups.

Well done guys.

There were a lot of disappointed Australian users last week when Twitter dropped its outgoing SMS alerts service to all territories outside of the US, Canada and India.

You can hardly blame Twitter tough – the service must have been costing an absolute fortune.

Well, Elias Bizannes (of Silicon Beach Australia / Data Portability fame) wasn’t the only one who thought this should be seen as a huge opportunity rather than a great loss. Already various organisations have emerged to fill the void.

Aussie twitterers looking for SMS alerts already have a couple of services to choose from: -

• Firstly, there’s twitsms - who are charging 11c an alert (to be prepaid for in lots of 100, 200 or 500)
• Secondly, there’s 3Jam who have apparently also announced that their Twitter SMS service, which will include a local Australian number, will go live tonight. (check that link out later on tonight)

Should also be interesting to see if the Silicon Beach Australia team can come up with something more interesting that these two options from their project.

I’m guessing that these are just the beginning of a flood of options, so keep an eye out for better and better deals in the near future.