Quark Inc, which failed recently in its ambitious bid to acquire rival Adobe Systems Inc, says it is still searching for technology acquisitions and still has its ongoing acquisitions fund of $200m to spend. Susan Friedman, VP of corporate development at Quark, is in charge of the effort and says Quark is on the lookout for technology that complements our existing products and allows us to move into new markets, including corporate enterprise, financial, medical, and other publishing- intensive industries. We will diversify our client base by providing business critical publishing solutions with an electronic commerce focus. More specifically, the privately-held company says it’s on the lookout for end-to-end catalog or direct marketing software, online and print catalog production software, real-time analytical tools for catalog and direct marketing, electronic storefront and web design publishing, content and workflow management, database driven content creation, and media publishing and management systems. To aggressively bring products to market quickly, we are combining technology acquisition with development in our research and development centers in Denver, Chicago, Germany, Singapore and India, says Friedman. Quark first set aside $200 for acquisitions in the summer of last year (CI No 3,215), and since then has acquired pre-press and content management firm Coris Inc (CI No 3,350) and publishing software house Silent GmbH (CI No 3,487). It has also put $100m aside to set up a new firm, Mirim LLC, which is developing internet-based financial accounting software (CI No 3,390). Quark also closed down one of its earlier acquisitions – mFactory Inc (CI No 3,156). Quark claims it’s been experiencing rapid growth, but doesn’t reveal the size of its revenues or profits. Analysts covering the high-end of the document layout software market, where the company’s QuarkXpress application dominates, suggest its revenues are about $300m, though other guesses range from $250m to $400m. Its attempt to buy Adobe, which posted 1997 revenues of $911.9m, suggest that estimates have been on the conservative size. For those companies which, unlike Adobe, wish to be acquired, Quark has set up a special email address. It is corpdev@quark.com