The TechCrunch article doesn't mention it, but Mochi has made some major contributions to Python/Erlang open source and Erlang evangelism for quite a while, including the MochiWeb HTTP server: http://code.google.com/p/mochiweb/
Congratulations to Bob Ippolito, a true hacker and co-founder & CTO of Mochi Media and a guy behind many open-source projects such as MochiWeb, PyTyrant and MochiKit :-)
I'll toss in my congratulations to Bob and to Jameson and Ryan as well. Ryan doesn't get a lot of credit, but he's one of the few people out there who can pull off a Web 2.0 design that's clearly identifiable as such but isn't derivative.
Successful competitors are God's way of signalling that there is money to be made in a field. Most markets are not winner take all and can support several firms, so if you're trying to demonstrate to a skeptical observer that your idea has value, you can say a) "Look at X, they're successful." and b) "You can't buy X at any attractive price, but happily for you, we're still cheap. Comparatively speaking."
That assumes you care about acquisitions. If you don't, though, same deal except you get to convince yourself. If one of my competitors mentioned they're making, say, a few million, that would be great news for me: it would mean there's a few million to be made. (I used to think my entire market generated probably $100,000 in sales a year. I'm thinking that probably substantially underestimates the current total, and think the size of the pie can still be increased.)
I agree with the benefits mentioned. There are probable drawbacks too, however.
Usually the acquirer has some strengths that will expand the market penetration of the company being acquired, in addition to larger coffers to invest. This could mean tougher competition for their competitors (except when the acquirer focuses on different market segments from these competitors.)
Acquisitions are a time when companies get distracted and in some cases change direction completely.
For instance, Slicehost dropped the ball (just a little bit, not a lot) when they got acquired, and people have been moving over, or starting fresh with Linode.
Not to mention that the acquiring company's core business is making and running big multiplayer games, not maintaining a payment platform for game authors. It's possible they just wanted the technology for their own games, which opens the middleware space for competitors -- sort of like EA's acquisition of RenderWare.
