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AP
Electronic Arts Offers $2B for Take-Two
Sunday February 24, 3:27 pm ET
Electronic Arts Offers to Buy Gaming Rival Take-Two Interactive for $2B, Despite Rebuffs
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) — Electronic Arts Inc. is pushing ahead with a bid to take over upstart gaming rival Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., despite rebuffs from the smaller company.EA said in a statement Sunday that it is making an all-cash bid of $26 per share, or about $2 billion, for New York-based Take-Two.
EA, the world’s largest independent video game publisher, says it’s releasing details of the proposal to get the attention of Take-Two shareholders after Take-Two’s board turned down the deal.
The offer represents a 64 percent premium over Take-Two’s closing stock price Feb. 15, the last trading day before Redwood City-based EA made its proposal.
By KEVIN J. DELANEY, ROBERT A. GUTH and VAUHINI VARA
October 25, 2007
Microsoft Corp.’s $240 million investment in Facebook Inc. — a three-year-old company with more promise than profit — represents a huge bet that the online advertising boom will continue and the popular social networking site will be among the biggest beneficiaries.
The software giant said yesterday that it will buy a 1.6% stake in Facebook, beating out Google Inc. after intense lobbying. The deal places a $15 billion valuation on the closely held Palo Alto, Calif., startup. Facebook, which runs a site where people set up personal Web pages, expects to break even this year, on a cash-flow basis, with revenue of $150 million, according to people familiar with the company.
TechCrunch - Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba.com
is looking to raise HK$10.3 billion ($1.3 billion) from its IPO
according to documents released to potential investors today.Alibaba.com Ltd. and Alibaba.com Corp. will sell a combined 858.9 million shares (17%) in Alibaba.com at HK$10 to HK$12 apiece, with Yahoo, currently a 40% share holder in the Alibaba Group buying HK$776 million of the IPO shares, resulting in 8.2% ownership of Alibaba.com Ltd, the newly listed IPO entity.
As we reported in July, the IPO will see the partial spin-off of Alibaba.com from the Alibaba Group, the China based holding company that owns sites including Alipay, Taabao.com and Yahoo China.
The IPO will value Alibaba.com at up to $7.8 billion. (more…)
Below is an interesting article on Internet Bubble indicators from WSJ:
SAN FRANCISCO — The Federal Reserve monitors things like inventory levels and housing starts to gauge the economy’s direction. In Silicon Valley, old-timers have some leading indicators of their own.
The goofy-names index, for example, is back near its previous high. Consider Orgoo Inc., which helps people organize all their Web communications. Or Zipidee Inc., a purveyor of “digital goods” such as cellphone ring tones. “Are these names of dogs or are they names of companies?” asks Kate Mitchell, a venture capitalist in Foster City, Calif.
The rate of odd-looking start-ups, too, is on the rise. One called Startup Schwag exists solely to deliver a monthly package of T-shirts and other goodies bearing logos of other tech start-ups. Rapper MC Hammer, known for 1990s hits like “U Can’t Touch This” and a 1996 bankruptcy filing, is chief strategy officer of an online-video start-up called DanceJam. PlaySpan Inc., a Web-gaming outfit that raised $6.5 million, boasted on its Web site that it had been founded by a fifth-grader.
Then there’s this familiar froth indicator: Some office landlords in Silicon Valley are again accepting stock in still-private start-ups in lieu of rent.
“It is absolutely déjà vu,” says David Chao, a venture capitalist in Menlo Park, Calif., who reports seeing lots of bad business ideas, from ever-younger entrepreneurs. “There’s just as much junk now as there was in 1999,” he says.
MacNN is reporting the following…”The impending release of Mac OS X Leopard could prove to be financially lucrative, says an analyst with the market research firm Piper Jaffray. Gene Munster notes that Leopard is being released at the end of the first month of a financial quarter, like the previous version of Mac OS X, Tiger; Leopard however will benefit from a much greater Mac OS X installed base, consisting of 23 million users versus 12 million. Since Tiger accrued $125 million in its launch quarter, with a 15 percent uptake in the space of just six weeks, Munster estimates that Leopard will add $240 million to Apple’s Q4 2007. Looking forward to January’s Macworld expo, Munster also predicts that Apple will release one of two products: a rumored touchscreen PDA somewhat larger than an iPhone, or a possible subnotebook.”
Monday October 8, 6:52 pm ET
By Michael Liedtke, AP Business Writer
Google’s Stock Price Surpasses $600 Per Share for First Time, Extending Monthlong Rally
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc.’s stock price sailed past $600 for the first time Monday, extending a monthlong rally propelled by the lofty expectations surrounding the Internet search leader’s upcoming third-quarter earnings report.
he Mountain View-based company’s shares traded as high as $610.26 before slipping back to $609.62, a gain of $15.57, or 2.6 percent. It marked the sixth time in the past 12 trading sessions that the stock has reached a new peak, indicating investors are confident Google’s third-quarter profit will be impressive. The results are scheduled to be released Oct. 18.
The latest milestone served as yet another reminder of the immense wealth created since Google went public in August 2004.
The shares have increased more than sevenfold from their initial public offering price of $85, bringing the nine-year-old company’s market value to $190 billion — eclipsing bigger, more mature businesses like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
It took 10 1/2 months for Google’s stock to leap from $500 to $600 and more than a year for the journey from $400 to $500. The shares hurdled $300 in June 2005 after passing the $100 and $200 thresholds in 2004.
Analysts began predicting Google’s stock would reach $600 at the start of 2006 when the shares were still hovering around $420. Some analysts already are predicting Google’s stock will hit $700 within the next year, but the average target price for the stock is $614.64 among analysts polled by Thomson Financial. (more…)
From Silicon Area Insider: A reader complained that we’ve been nothing but negative of late–recession, Microsoft, Yahoo, newspapers, music, dying TV ads, etc.–so we’ll brighten your afternoon with some rip-roaring positivity.Remember a couple years back when some analyst floated the idea that Google could eventually be worth $2,000 a share–and was ridiculed from coast to coast? Well, first it’s worth noting that Google is now almost a third of the way there. Second, it’s worth noting that $2,000 a share would mean a market cap of about $750 billion, which–given a reasonable time horizon–just isn’t that far-fetched.
Why? First, from a macro level, in every technology wave, the market leader usually ends up amassing more power, wealth, and market capitalization than the leaders in the prior wave, often by a startling magnitude. The leaders in the last technology wave included Microsoft and Cisco, both of which peaked around $500 billion in market capitalization.
Even a room full of bears would no doubt agree that there will eventually be a company that has at least a $1 trillion market capitalization. So name one company that is better positioned than Google to one day have a $1 trillion market capitalization. (more…)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Colombian pop star Shakira announced a $40 million donation on Thursday to repair damage caused by an earthquake in Peru and a hurricane in Nicaragua. The singer, widely known for her single “Hips Don’t Lie,” revealed the donation from a foundation she co-founded during a summit on global climate change and development organized by former U.S. president Bill Clinton in New York.
Shakira is the co-founder of the Latin America for Solidarity Foundation, ALAS, which means wings in Spanish, with Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“I’ve seen first-hand many of the challenges facing Latin America,” she said in a statement.
The two-time Grammy Award winner, who started another foundation to help poor children in Colombia when she was only 18, said 40 million infants do not go to school and 51 million people don’t have access to clean water in Latin America.
“These are challenging problems that no one person can address, but working together everyone can help make a difference,” she added. (more…)
