Inconsistent currencies

Posted by on October 31, 2008

Throughout much of the year, the US dollar looked like lightweight paper. A buck basically bought you a loonie (as our northern neighbors call their dollar), and foreign exchange traders were heard shouting jokes about ‘the American peso.’ We noted the weak US dollar as one of the key reasons that total M&A spending by [...]

Of ‘corrections’ and ‘recalibrations’

Posted by on October 30, 2008

Since the beginning of September, a new euphemism has found its way into Wall Street parlance: ‘recalibration.’ It is a close cousin to the original euphemism, ‘correction.’ In fact, the pair of linguistically neutral terms are often popping up in the same sentence, such as ‘Given the market’s correction, we have recalibrated the deal.’ We [...]

Ad networks: What recession?

Posted by on October 30, 2008

Online advertising continues to be a lucrative game. M&As are on the rise and funding is flowing freely to startups. Will this trend continue or crash and burn like so many other inflated Web fads?

Smoothing the spread

Posted by on October 28, 2008

With the stock market in turmoil, more than a few deals have seen a gulf widen between the current price of a would-be target and its proposed takeout price. So the question becomes: How to smooth the spread? Well, two different approaches – with wildly different results – seem to support the idea of disclosure, [...]

Expensive independence

Posted by on October 24, 2008

It was a rough week all around for stocks (once again), but the decline was especially galling for holders of shares in companies that had earlier attracted unsolicited offers. Two big would-be targets, neither of which is still being hunted, were in the news again this week: Yahoo and SanDisk. And the news wasn’t good. [...]

Fixed on the market

Posted by on October 23, 2008

Although the IPO market is closed right now, some VCs are nonetheless steering – and steeling – their portfolio companies for a public market payday. Of course, that often means passing up a trade sale, which holds out the appealing prospect of cash on close. But Menlo Ventures’ John Jarve pointed out in his talk [...]

Symantec-Veritas without the strings

Posted by on October 21, 2008

Where Symantec purchased, McAfee will partner. Having watched its major security competitor get bogged down with a storage acquisition, McAfee has opted for a low-risk partnership to tie its security products with storage. The largest stand-alone security vendor said Tuesday that it has struck an alliance with data management software provider CommVault. The initial integrated [...]

Early, and over-looked

Posted by on October 21, 2008

In times of uncertainty, investors tend to gravitate toward known companies. That’s seen in the public market, where large cap tech stocks have weathered the storm on Wall Street better than their smaller brethren. And, we’re getting word that phenomenon also played out in the private market. Dow Jones VentureSource reported Monday that later-stage investments [...]

Net effect from Intel’s buy

Posted by on October 20, 2008

10Gb Ethernet technology vendor NetEffect shut its doors last month in a bankruptcy sale. The company spent millions of investors’ money pursuing an almost nonexistent market. What does this mean for the countless rivals still struggling for relevance?

Marked-down leftovers

Posted by on October 17, 2008

When Oracle snapped up Primavera Systems last week, we had to spare a thought for the surviving project and portfolio management (PPM) vendors. That thought almost became the start of a eulogy as we saw Primavera’s publicly traded rival get trounced on the Nasdaq and its direct competitor still out on the market seeking a [...]

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