BKM Blog

links for 2008-11-16

Brian Magierski — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:01:42 +0000

DealBook - Why Obama May Assent to Deals - NYTimes.com

(tags: dealmaking policy m&a obama)
Vacation Rental Site Raises $250 Million - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

(tags: homeaway vc funding consolidation)
The Cash Panic Sweeping The VC Industry

(tags: vc privateequity)
Cash panic sweeping VC industry - The capital calls problem - NYTimes.com

(tags: vc privateequity)

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links for 2008-11-11

Brian Magierski — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:01:41 +0000

The Crisis & What to Do About It - The New York Review of Books

(tags: reflexivity crisis soros creditcrisis regulation)

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links for 2008-11-04

Brian Magierski — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:02:59 +0000

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links for 2008-10-30

Brian Magierski — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:03:04 +0000

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links for 2008-10-29

Brian Magierski — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:02:28 +0000

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links for 2008-10-25

Brian Magierski — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:01:02 +0000

Google Reminds Googlers: You're Getting Rich Even As Stock Tanks

(tags: google tso transferrablestockoption optionality options)

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links for 2008-10-23

Brian Magierski — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:09:00 +0000

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links for 2008-10-22

Brian Magierski — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:01:41 +0000

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links for 2008-10-17

Brian Magierski — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:01:35 +0000

Forbes ranks Austin best city for the value - Austin Business Journal:

(tags: austin)

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links for 2008-10-16

Brian Magierski — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:01:28 +0000

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links for 2008-10-15

Brian Magierski — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:01:33 +0000

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links for 2008-10-13

Brian Magierski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:01:17 +0000

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links for 2008-10-12

Brian Magierski — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:00:43 +0000

Bloomberg.com:

(tags: creditcrisis lending)
Can China Weather a Downturn? - Seeking Alpha

(tags: china downturn economy creditcrisis)
Smart Startup Advice: Don't Panic - Profit

(tags: vc startup crisis downturn)

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links for 2008-10-11

Brian Magierski — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:00:41 +0000

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links for 2008-10-09

Brian Magierski — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:01:46 +0000

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links for 2008-10-07

Brian Magierski — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:01:24 +0000

For IPOs, a Slow Month Is a Harbinger of More - WSJ.com

(tags: IPO)

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links for 2008-10-01

Brian Magierski — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:01:52 +0000

PR 2.0: The State of Social Media 2008

(tags: pr2.0 web2.0 socialmediamarketing)

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links for 2008-09-22

Brian Magierski — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:01:49 +0000

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links for 2008-09-18

Brian Magierski — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:02:10 +0000

Information Arbitrage: Good Bank/Bad Bank on a Grand Scale: Bringing Back the RTC

(tags: crisis RTC finance)

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links for 2008-09-16

Brian Magierski — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:37:28 +0000

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links for 2008-08-20

Brian Magierski — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:10:44 +0000

nGenera offers business project SaaS | 19 Aug 2008 | ComputerWeekly.com

(tags: ngenera tapscott nGen wikinomics)

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Rackspace Prices IPO

Brian Magierski — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:05:54 +0000

Rackspace (RAX) priced today at $12.50 / share near the low end of a range of $12 to $16 per share through a dutch auction process.

It was a tough deal to get through even with Rackspace’s high quality numbers. They ended up raising $187.5 Million in cash (down from an initial desire to raise $400 Million when they filed back in April 2008). Still, it’s an opening and a deal done … let’s see who follows.

Stock started trading at $10/share down from the pricing of $12.50/share, and closed at $10 after a climb for most of the day. See below …

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC and Merrill Lynch & Co. are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering. W.R. Hambrecht + Co., LLC, Jefferies & Company, Inc., Cowen and Company, LLC, RBC Capital Markets Corporation, JMP Securities LLC, Signal Hill Capital Group LLC, and E*TRADE Securities LLC are the co-managers for the offering.

It appears that enough buyers exist in the $100 Million range to get IPOs out … will be interesting to see what kind of liquidity exists above and below that threshold, or even if more try to come out in the $100 Million range.

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Google’s Trojan Horse into the Enterprise?

Brian Magierski — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:46:50 +0000

On the heels of Salesforce.com partnering with Google Enterprise to integrate Google Apps into Salesforce.com, Google has now done an equally extensive partnership and integration with SuccessFactors around embedding Google Apps and other apps into the HCM SaaS applications of SuccessFactors.

Google’s enterprise playbook seems like it is, or should be, clear … continue to build the collaborative productivity applications on the backs of consumers, layer & integrate them into the main enterprise SaaS apps via partnerships, and then probably consolidate those companies into Google - i.e. acquire SFDC, SFSF / TLEO, and others in core SaaS categories where the players are getting enterprise traction (i.e. above only SMB).

This is not the first time somebody has suggested that Google might acquire Salesforce.com, but the path is becoming clearer, and it would be more logical as part of a broader SaaS consolidation play along with SuccessFactors, and potentially others like Omniture and/or Taleo.

Even Eric Schmidt has commented publicly about the core nature of apps to Google (quote below was pulled from here):

CEO Eric Schmidt described “apps” as one of three strategic components for the company, alongside search and ads, adding that charging businesses for apps “is a business that looks like it is going to grow very nicely for us.”

What is unclear is the potential timing of this playbook being executed …

Some reasons why it might happen quickly are below:

Cisco or somebody else (Microsoft) takes a strong interest in acquiring Salesforce.com, which could force Google’s hand as SFDC is a unique property
Google feels pressure to diversify more quickly from its pure advertising model sooner due to the economy and other factors

Regardless of the above, I would consider betting that Google starts running a playbook like this within 18 to 24 months at the latest. The need for new growth engines may be motivation enough to move quickly, and as Henry Blodget points out, building out an enterprise-class sales & support infrastructure is not something that happens overnight.

It certainly seems like the clock has begun to tick faster for Microsoft on its Exchange / Sharepoint / Office franchises. With that at stake, the fascination with Yahoo is an even bigger head scratcher.

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How Enterprises are using Twitter

Brian Magierski — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:58:14 +0000

Here is a great article from today’s Boston Globe about how Comcast and Southwest Air are using Twitter - fascinating stuff. It also highlights Dell’s social media efforts, and the IdeaStorm concept for bringing their customers inside their organization to co-innovate (Customer Inside).

From Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research analyst and co-author of Groundswell (a great read for anyone considering Social Media efforts in business):

“We’re in a world where one person, by their actions, can make a company look bad, and it can get echoed and amplified over and over again,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and coauthor of “Groundswell,” a book about business and social technologies. “The power has shifted, [so] that big companies now have to be worried about one individual with a microphone called a blog.”

These are clearly emerging case studies of how enterprises are making use of Social Media, but are certainly harbingers of great things to come. Many of the highlighted use cases are for customer engagement, which means the enterprises are recognizing the growing voice and power of their customer base due to the Web 2.0 technology revolution.

If you look at how Southwest is using Twitter and Social Media in general, you can begin to see the emergence of new business processes that are different than those developed in the Business Process Re-engineering initiative … or dare I say it, Next Generation? These are agile and collaborative business processes, which will be required of all companies aspiring to be Next Generation Enterprises.

At Southwest Airlines, the social media team includes a chief Twitter officer who tracks Twitter comments and monitors a Facebook group, an online representative who fact checks and interacts with bloggers, and another who takes charge of the company’s presence on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. So if someone posts a complaint in cyberspace, the company can respond in a personal way.

It’s also interesting to see how enterprises are sparked into action. A couple - Comcast (b/c of Comcast Must Die and other YouTube campaigns) and Dell (b/c of Dell Hell) - were kicked in due to strongly negative publicity. Others like Southwest Airlines seem to have taken a proactive approach to provide an engagement channel for their customers. Even those that were kicked in, like Comcast and Dell, deserve strong kudos for their social media engagement efforts … it would have been easy to dismiss these efforts as only point cases amongst tens of millions of customers, completely edge. However, these companies took proactive action, and should be long-term beneficiaries of this effort.

Reacting to customer complaints is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delivering a Next Generation Customer experience, and embracing customers to co-innovate new products and services, which is exactly what social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and others can enable companies to do.

I’ve also found other companies using Twitter in a proactive manner … including JetBlue and Whole Foods.

The future is bright!

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links for 2008-07-07

Brian Magierski — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:30:22 +0000

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Forstmann’s view on the credit crisis

Brian Magierski — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:43:49 +0000

An interesting and very frightening assessment by Ted Forstmann on the state of the credit crisis (WSJ - Subscription required) - his assessment, we’re in the “second inning.” His view may be extreme, and I do want to compare it with Soros’ view in his latest book, but there must be some to a fair amount of truth to Forstmann’s view. Below are some snippets from the WSJ Commentary.

“I don’t know when money was ever this inexpensive in the history of this country. But not in modern times, that’s for sure.”

Combine this with loan syndication and securitization, and the result is a nasty brew. Securitization and syndication allow the banks to take the loans off their books and replenish their capital. They then use this capital to make new loans, which they securitize or syndicate and sell to the hedge funds, which buy them with the money they borrowed from the banks. For a time, everyone makes money.

………….

One reason is that the proliferation of new financial instruments has left the system more closely intertwined than ever, making a workout, or even a shakeout, much more difficult. Take what happened to Bear Stearns. “What should the health of one brokerage firm in America mean to the entire global financial system? To an ordinary person, probably not much. But in today’s world, with all the interdependence, a great deal.”

This circular creation of new credit, used to buy more newly created debt, all financed by ultracheap money and all betting with each other, has left the major firms hopelessly intertwined. “It’s very interrelated,” he says, locking his fingers together. “There’s trillions and trillions of dollars that slosh around between all these places and if one fails . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

I’m curious to know who is doing cutting edge research on the exposure of the interdependencies about which Forstmann speaks. It sounds like some type of domino-like crisis is possible, but I would like to see an analysis of what types of Black Swan events would take to trigger it. Please post any links to relevant research in the comments.

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links for 2008-07-02

Brian Magierski — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:30:26 +0000

Portals - WSJ.com

(tags: longtail web2.0)
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?

(tags: longtail)

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