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Cisco is buying the Web security company for $183 million in cash and retention incentives, which means all 150 employees will be moving to Cisco, said ScanSafe co-founder Roy Tuvey. He said ScanSafe had several offers from large technology companies, but probably wouldn't have acted on any of them had Cisco not come along. ScanSafe was looking for acquisitions itself -- the company hadn't spent any of the $10 million Series C round it raised late last year as a hedge against the downturn and as a "war chest" to buy companies. "We picked Cisco purely because it was Cisco," Tuvey said. "It was Cisco that made us do this."

Y Combinator has extended the application deadline for its winter funding cycle (originally 10 P.M. tonight) by two days, so entrepreneurs can come up with ideas for software to build on top of Twitter. Y Combinator's Paul Graham and Twitter's Biz Stone thought of this on Saturday while they were chatting at Y Combinator's Startup School, according to Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston, and decided their idea was so good they had to act on it immediately. "Twitter wants to encourage startups to build stuff on top of Twitter, but they're so busy and there are so many people doing this, they need help figuring out who to pay attention to," Livingston said. "We in turn are thrilled to be able to fund a company doing something with Twitter because it's a new protocol. It's not a fad -- it's here to stay."

Both TechCrunch and VentureBeat transcribed an interesting interview this weekend with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke at Y Combinator's School for Startups in Berkeley on how Facebook got started. I think that intentionally or not, Zuckerberg, now 25, has done a lot of things right. He said he launched Facebook at schools that were "least receptive" to test the product; always works to build something that users want (investor Peter Thiel told him, "Don't mess it up"); limited growth when the economy got bad so Facebook could get cash-flow positive; and tries to make sure that employees are always learning -- even when that means they might not stay at Facebook forever. What interested me most, though, was the advice that Zuckerberg said he took from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.

The DOE's newly formed ARPA-E -- an Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy modeled after the Defense Department's DARPA, which created the Internet -- handed out $151 million in funding today to 37 companies and projects. Some are venture-funded -- companies backed by Khosla Ventures, Polaris, North Bridge, incTANK Ventures and the secretive X/Seed Capital are on the list. But most are still projects inside universities, federal labs or big companies. Some are in stealth mode, and some don't even have Web sites.

Or hadn't you noticed? Maybe that's because you don't work with enough women, who also speak in code -- a different one. In the interest of helping men and women solve the age-old problem of how to communicate better, so they can work together better, so women can make as much money as men, Claire Damken Brown and Audrey Nelson have written a book: "Code Switching: How to Talk So Men Will Listen." It's a primer for working women on how to speak, dress, and behave in a way that will make men take them seriously at the office. Nelson has spent her career studying women's issues and says nearly half of the clients for her consulting business are technology companies. She also works with government agencies, lawyers, financial companies and accounting firms. ("The worst," she says).

The company raised another $7.1 million this month from its current investors -- Draper Fisher and U.S. Venture Partners -- but kept mum, allowing the new money to be revealed instead by an SEC filing. Marketing VP Jen Grant told me it's not a new round, but an extension of the $6 million Series B that Box.net raised nearly two years ago, in January 2008. (There was also a $1.5 million Series A round in 2006). "We decided not to go for a Series C given the economic climate," she said. "It's not the valuation we would want."

In the wake of the uproar lately over Jason Calacanis and his demands that angel groups like the Keiretsu Forum let entrepreneurs pitch companies for free, Keiretsu's Silicon Valley chapter invited me to have breakfast with them this morning and attend one of their pitch sessions. It featured five entrepreneurs who'd made it through Keiretsu's screening process and on to the next hurdle -- a roomful of very tough judges. Setting aside the verbal gymnastics over whether Calacanis also charges entrepreneurs -- they can pitch at his and Michael Arrington's TechCrunch50 conference for free, but most of them pay to attend -- the two events could not have been more different. Going to TechCrunch50 was like hanging around with my kids -- who are noisy, energetic, and seem to be always eating -- while going to the Keiretsu Forum reminded me of the time I went to a Kiwanis Club lunch with my dad.

A paper prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Northrop Grummon has some disturbing details on how Chinese hackers exploited "zero-day" flaws -- meaning flaws for which the manufacturer has no patch -- in Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Microsoft's WordPad, which just about everybody with a computer has, to steal information from U.S. corporate and government computers. The flaws were so serious that U.S. CERT (the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team) issued warnings on them. Apparently Adobe's took a month to fix. I raise this because even though there are several venture-backed companies selling protection against inevitable and all-too-common software flaws, the problem keeps getting worse.

Grant Thornton confirmed that the study will be rolled out at a press conference on November 9th. It's been in the works for two years. One VC who's aware of it, Pascal Levensohn, said he was "shocked" when he learned what's in it. "It has really scary statistics about the secular decline in marketshare, globally, that all listed markets in the U.S. have been experiencing since 1997," he said. "This proves that (the IPO drought) has nothing to do with Sarbanes Oxley and the tech bubble. The reality is that America peaked in 1997 as a capital markets force in equities, and since then it's gone straight down and every other market has gone up."

VCs investing in healthcare, medical device and biotech companies have to figure their charges will be impacted by Congress not just this year, but over the next decade, says ScaleVP's Mark Brooks. So planning investments in these areas can be tricky. On the one hand, he figures, 20 million to 40 million more people could have health insurance, which is good because they'd be buying more healthcare. On the other hand, details on how to pay for this extra insurance and stop ever rising healthcare costs have been scarce. One proposal in Washington is to tax insurance, medical device and pharmaceutical companies --