Back in July I suggested that, despite Google’s attempts to prove a Yahoo deal would not create a monopoly, the perception of a monopoly would likely scuttle the deal. Today, we learn that the Department of Justice was just 3 hours away from filing antitrust charges against Google: “We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day,” says Litvack, who rejoins Hogan & Hartson today. “We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.” “It would have ended...
Image via WikipediaAmazing, the optimism in Silicon Valley compared to the rest of the country. The angel climate cannot be said to be good, but it doesn't sound too bad compared to, say, the Big 3 automakers. It's much cheaper for a company to start up and keep running today, because the price of technology has gone down. If the company has started, and does have some traction, prices are low, and buyers will come in to the market and make small acquisitions. There will be exits. This was difficult for me to grok, but when you listen to investors...
In what has been completely overshadowed by the announcement of the upcoming Nokia N97, Nokia announced today that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited. For those who don’t recall, Nokia announced back in June that it would be gobbling up the 52% of Symbian it did not already own and going open source. In a quick and dirty press release, Nokia stated that it has purchased 99.9% of Symbian shares it did not already own when the original announcement was made. Nokia handsets might take a while to reach market but don’t ever say the Finns...
Another day, another hare-brained scheme to buy Yahoo. This time, the player isn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who now runs a venture-capital fund. But the prospect of a deal seems as far off and fanciful as Microsoft, which spent most of the spring and summer trying to buy Yahoo, coming back to the negotiating table. Miller wants to buy Yahoo, but is having trouble coming up with the money, the Wall Street Journal reports. Is there no one serious who wants to buy this company? It's been a grindingly frustrating comedown for what was...
The news that Pownce was closing its doors met the blogosphere with little surprise yesterday. Launched about a year ago, it was a media darling that the New York Times labeled “The Hottest Startup in Silicon Valley“. Many people thought that anything Kevin Rose touched would turn to gold, and certainly if anyone could pull the job off, it would be him with his massive online following and immense resources at his disposal. But in the end, it simply failed to gain any traction. So, on the left we have Kevin Rose, who has made millions off Digg, which...
Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks. The San Francisco startup was the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka (also a Digg employee). It’s a micro-blogging service kind of like Twitter, but it allowed users to share much more than brief messages, including embeddable photos, videos and mp3s. Despite those advantages, Pownce’s traffic stalled while Twitter’s skyrocketed, according to data...
Gannett announced its acquisition of white label social networking provider Ripple6 last week, continuing the shift of new media being further integrated into old media traditions. Having created solutions for business and enterprises to layer in social media and networking capabilities for internal or consumer-facing solutions, Ripple6 has the technology that Gannett is interested in specifically for market research and marketing purposes. There have been years of effort poured into finding ways in which to use online outlets for business purposes, from blogs to forums, and with the acquisition of Ripple6, Gannett is indicating whre its interests lie from the...
Political news site The Huffington Post announced today that it has raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners — significantly higher than the $15 million that was reported by the Times UK in late November. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital says the valuation was slightly less than $100 million. This basically confirms what VentureBeat writer Eric Eldon guessed last month when the funding rumors surfaced: “Like PaidContent said, the funding isn’t closed and the amount isn’t determined.” HuffPo, as it is commonly called, is looking to build on its momentum from the presidential race. You’d expect a lot of...
Technorati has become the latest Silicon Valley start-up to announce a staff restructuring and salary cuts. Chief Executive Richard Jalichandra wrote in a blog post that management members are taking pay cuts ranging from 15% to 25% and employees are taking a 10% cut. There were also six layoffs at the company, which in June broadened its blog-search business by launching an ad network. “There’s not much I can say about the economy that hasn’t been said a hundred times already,” Jalichandra wrote. “We’re facing the worst crisis of our lifetimes, and no one can say with certainty what lies...
