Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has acquired inspiration tool Plinky from Thing Labs, who are also creators of the Brizzly Twitter app. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Plinky provides a daily prompt or question and asks the user to respond with text, photos and multimedia. We first wrote about the website when it launched in January 2009. Backed then, we said it offered “a new twist on microblogging” with a pretty interface, but that it also suffered from “a bloated sense of self.”

Automattic has found a smart use for the app, though. In its blog post, the company behind WordPress.com clearly positions the acquisition as a way to overcome writer’s block. Getting started with Plinky on your blog requires signing up for a Plinky account though, but we imagine that barrier will eventually be dissolved as it gets stronger integration with WordPress.

If WordPress.com lives and dies by the amount of content its users generate, then Plinky should be a powerful tool to get new and causal writers to create more content.

img credit: xanxhor

Google has acquired Agnilux, a very secretive stealth startup founded by former Apple employees that reportedly was working on new server technology.

The company was founded by a group of engineers from P.A. Semi, which was acquired by Apple in April 2008 for $278 million — their technology is what powers the Apple iPad’s A4 microprocessor.

After the acquisition, several employees left Apple to found Agnilux, including Amarjit Gill, the former EVP of Sales and Business Development for P.A. Semi. Very little is known about the startup, with a recent report from NYT’s Bits Blog uncovering only that it’s working on some type of server and that it has a partnership with Cisco.

A Google spokesperson told us the following: “We’re pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don’t have any additional information to share right now.”

Google could be using Agnilux to upgrade or enhance its server technology. The search giant owns hundreds of thousands, if not millions of servers to power the world’s search queries. Any improvement in efficiency would be a boon to Google’s bottom line.

The acquisition was first reported by peHUB. Agnilux’s website has been taken down since the report.