by Jason Wilk on June 30, 2009
- Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) Director, Gordon Cambell, disclosed the sale of 106,939 shares of PALM common share on 6/29 at $15.84/share, following the exercising of options on the exact same number of shares at prices from $2.21-$5.46. Cambell’s remaining direct holding in the company following the sale is “zero” shares.
- The options had Expiration Dates between 10/28/2013 and 09/12/2014.
- Shares of PALM have seen a meteoric rise this year due to the successful development and launch of the new Palm Pre smartphone. The stock is up an amazing 436% YTD. Cambell has been a director of Palm since since September 1999.
- Is this the end of the unbelievable ride that Palm has taken it’s investors on for the last 12 months or was this executive jumping the gun? The stock is up another 5% even on this news. [street insider]
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by Jason Wilk on March 16, 2009
- As you may have heard, Google’s (GOOG) Tim Armstrong has become chairman and CEO of the troubled AOL Web property. Here is what he had to say to his new employees. Keep an eye out for the chopping block in the next couple weeks as he makes his rounds to check out the clearly broken AOL infrastructure.
From: Tim Armstrong
To: US Employees; Intl Employees
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 9:24:54 AM
Subject: Hello AOLers
Hello AOLers -
I’m really looking forward to seeing you and would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to make AOL and its sister properties the most powerful brands on the Internet.
My experience online started with AOL and I’ve followed the progress of the company for many years. From the early days of AIM and ICQ to the modern technology of Platform-A, AOLers are responsible for some of the most important innovations on the Internet. Although others might see challenges at AOL, I see opportunity and people who are passionate about making great products and services for consumers. My thanks to Randy and Ron for the work they’ve done to position AOL for the future.
I hope to meet as many of you as possible in Dulles and New York sometime next week, and I look forward with great enthusiasm to starting at AOL in early April. Go AOL.
- TA
by Jason Wilk on February 2, 2009
- Well, it’s no mystery now, there is an iPhone 2 in the wild somewhere, and two people are walking around with it. Since Apple was recently granted the patent for everything the iPhone is capable of, many are curious if video conferencing and video recording will be included in the next phone. In several areas throughout the document as seen below, there are many mentions of using video. Everything else seen in the patent is already in use on the phone.
“The device supports a variety of applications, such as one or more of the following: a telephone application, a video conferencing application, an e-mail application, an instant messaging application, a blogging application, a photo management application, a digital camera application, a digital video camera application, a Web browsing application, a digital music player application, and/or a digital video player application.”
“In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital videoing, Web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing. Instructions for performing these functions may be included in a computer-readable storage medium or other computer program product configured for execution by one or more processors.”
“In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition. In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display. In some embodiments, the position of the optical sensor can be changed by the user (e.g., by rotating the lens and the sensor in the device housing) so that a single optical sensor may be used along with the touch screen display for both video conferencing and still and/or video image acquisition.”
by Jason Wilk on January 13, 2009
- According to BoomTown and several sources familiar with Yahoo (YHOO), Carol Bartz (Now Confirmed) is hot on the radar to replace Co-founder Jerry Yang. Bartz is a longtime and high-profile Silicon Valley executive who presided over huge success at design technology giant, Autodesk (ADSK), until stepping down in April of 2006 to sit as a chairman. During her time there, net revenues increased from $285 million to more than $534 million.
- Other notches on her Resume include 10 years as vice president at Sun Microsystems(JAVA). She has also held product line and sales management positions at other high-tech companies; she is also an expert in computer science.
- Here’s how the dots connect. Bartz currently sits on the boards of Intel (INTC), Cisco Systems (CSCO), NetApp (NTAP), and the Foundation for the National Medals of Science and Technology. Jerry Yang is also on the board of Cisco, and Yahoo President Sue Decker is on Intel’s.
- Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock promised investors a new leader would be in place soon and that they are on finally decisions to go with an internal or external for the head position. Who’s in the running? John Chapple, former Nextel CEO, Maggie Wilderotter, a former Microsoft exec, Jonathan Miller, former AOL CEO.
- One of my 7 predications of 2009 was that a new Yahoo CEO would get an offer back from Microsoft closer to the original $33 deal. I wouldn’t mind seeing Bartz in charge of this goal: she is a seasoned CEO of successfully running public companies, understands computer technology from the ground up, and has dealt with mergers and acquisitions before.
- In any event, the new Yahoo CEO will have a big task at large, restoring company morale after Jerry.
by Jason Wilk on December 19, 2008
- Y Combinator startup Scribd
has raised its 4th round of financing – $9 million from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. This puts their total funding at around $12.8 million in an attempt to become the YouTube for documents.
- Launched one year after Scribd, Los Angeles based, DocStoc jumped onto the scene to capture some of the market. DocStoc has raised a total of $4 million and has executed well although still trails Scribd’s traffic. Both companies lack many direct hits and both are heavily reliant on search engines, which happen to love giving embeddable documents a high page rank.
- The battle next year will be to see who can become profitable. Both companies are seeing a lot of visitors, but converting dollars on those people are difficult when the only form of revenue is from google text ads. Although much of the content found on either site (such with YouTube) is unmonetizable, there is a considerable amount that is. Legal, tutorial, career, health & fitness, etc. documents all bring in people to the site that are looking for something specific and the document they eventually find was probably submitted by someone who is able to offer that service. Example: Someone looking for an NDA may be interested in talking with a lawyer, and the document they find may have have been uploaded by a local lawyer.
- Both companies essentially would need to re-format the way their content in these categories are displayed to users, returning documents submitted by local businesses first. This would help convert leads for businesses as well as provide them with incentive to upload more quality documents to the site. This method would let DocStoc and Scribd monetize effectively by having sponsored documents as well as having users submit their email address to embed or download a document. You can charge companies per click on sponsored documents and sell leads to businesses looking for information about users downloading documents in areas relevant to their service offering. Moreover, by driving revenue from the content, both companies can begin to engage in paid search marketing for the areas that their SEO is lacking. Example: If you are searching for an NDA, places like LegalZoom dominate the space because they are a sponsored search result and can measure conversions. DocStoc or Scribd couldn’t make sense of spending search dollars without any way to bring the dollars back in.
- It will be interesting to see who wins this game. I have to assume that one of the companies will be crowned the winner in the end, since both operations require a decent amount of overhead and dollars will need to be brought in. It will be a battle, since both organizations have incredibly talented management, such as Jason Nazar (CEO of DocStoc).
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