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In my humble opinion, and for what it's worth, the next generation of Internet Company offerings will NOT be about the cutesy old anagrams or abbreviations such as "FWIW" or "IMHO" but will be more about offering REAL THINGS to REAL PEOPLE.
The next generation of internet people will be more concerned about how the internet can help them beyond trivial entertainment than ever before.
Watch for companies like MSFT and YHOO as they try to address these real needs and succesfully escape from the feeling of the need to gather users with such vehicles as Instant Messaging.
In Today's World, Instant Messaging is becoming a moot point as more and more people gravitate to and rely on cell phone text messaging. Today, people don't even realize that they are USING the internet to get their silly text messages over their cell phones.
I find it increasingly intrigiung to read about the Internet Companies who are finally REALIZING that their very way to success is solely by using the internet as an advertising vehicle to support their ambitions of future growth.
At last, finally the Internet has become what it set out to be.......an ADVERTISING MEDIUM! Who wins or loses in this ultimate race of time is anybody's guess!
Who will the winners be?
Here is Microsoft and the XBOX 380!
http://app.quotemedia.com/quotetools/newsItem.htm?storyId=2016851&topic=MSFT
I'll start the conversation here with a look at GOOGLE!
Check out their price chart!
At the IPO, even I speculated that it was worth perhaps no more than $80 per share.
Look what has happened since the IPO!
And in case you didn't know even DELL and YAHOO are heating up once again!
Seems to me to be that a once overinflated internet bubble which got overinflated and subsequently deflated is VERY RIPE for inflation again!
Opinions? Comments?
It's time people!
It's time for a resurrection of bad thinking vs. good thinking about the growth of the Internet.
It's time to discuss what will happen next as the internet relates to us as an investment vehicle.
It's time to focus on who the leaders are today and where they may be tomorrow.
It's time again.
FINALLY!
Interesting board you have here, Dave. ;)
How dumb can investors be?
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Dutch man pleaded guilty on Monday to duping investors into committing nearly $3 million for nonexistent shares of the Internet search engine company Google through a bogus pre-initial public offering.
Shamoon Rafiq, 30, pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud and faces 51 to 63 months in jail. He would have faced 70 to 80 months had he not accepted responsibility, court officials said.
He was charged after an FBI investigation into the fraud scheme that took advantage of publicity surrounding Google Inc.'s announced plans to make a public stock offering.
Rafiq's victims agreed to invest more than $2.8 million and deposited more than $500,000 in various accounts held by Rafiq.
Although no date or price has been set for Google's actual offering, Rafiq told his victims he was able to purchase pre-IPO Google stock, which he said was available to "family and friends" at a discount.
Rafiq falsely presented himself as a limited partner of the venture capital firm backing the Google offering or as an individual involved with the Google IPO. He also falsely claimed he had attended Stanford University with the founders of the Internet business.
Prosecutors described transactions with five of his victims and also detailed a wild spending spree by Rafiq, who spent about $186,000 on restaurants, strip clubs, jewelry and fancy hotels during a three-month period from November 2003.
His lawyer, Michael Rosen, said that after sentencing he would ask that Rafiq, identified in court papers as a business development manager based in New York for the global telecommunications company British Telecom Inc., be allowed to serve his sentence in the Netherlands.
What's happening with ONLINE Grocery Shopping?
Find out here...
http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=7183
Google Files for IPO
Google files with SEC for public offering
Online search firm seeks to raise $2.7 billion in IPO
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - Internet search engine leader Google Inc. filed its long-awaited IPO plans Thursday, thumbing its nose at Wall Street's traditions even as the company prepares to cash in on its meteoric success.
Without specifying a price per share, Google said it hopes to raise $2.7 billion with an initial public offering that has created the biggest high-tech buzz since the dot-com bubble burst four years ago.
The IPO is expected to give Google a market value of at least $20 billion, creating scores of new Silicon Valley millionaires - including many of the company's 1,900 employees.
"Feels great!" Google employee Edwina Beaus said as she walked between buildings at the company's Mountain View headquarters - a hub known as the "Googleplex."
But even as it prepared to dance with the Wall Street bankers who will take it public, Google warned investors that it won't take its marching orders from the markets.
"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one," co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in an open letter included in the IPO filing.
As expected, Google said the price of its IPO will be determined through an auction designed to give the general public a better chance to buy its stock before the shares begin trading, most likely in late summer or early autumn. IPO shares traditionally have been restricted to an elite group picked by the investment bankers handling the deal.
Google picked two long-established investment bankers - Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston - to manage its populist IPO approach.
Although Google's stock won't be sold for several more months, the filing represents a significant milestone in the 5½-year-old company's evolution from a fun-loving startup to a corporate adolescent that will be held more accountable for how it manages its money.
Google has done well so far, according to a filing that shined a light on the privately held company's finances for the first time.
Depending almost entirely on advertising linked to online searches, Google earned $105.6 million, or 41 cents per share, on revenue of $962 million last year. Google got off to an even better start this year, with a first-quarter profit of $64 million, or 24 cents per share - more than doubling its earnings of $25.8 million, or 10 cents per share, at the same time last year.
By going public, Google will be under greater pressure to produce steady earnings growth - an expectation that some executives say leads to shortsighted management decisions.
As a public company, "you become sharper in some respects, but it also can cause you to make some decisions just so you can show growth from quarter to quarter," said Steve Berkowtiz, chief executive of Ask Jeeves Inc., a Google rival and business partner.
But Google says it won't fall into that trap, striving to remain true to the vision of the iconoclastic Page and Brin, former Stanford University graduate students who founded the company in 1998. In one of its first rebellious steps, Google will refuse to project its earnings from quarter to quarter, according to the letter signed by Page and Brin.
"A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour," they wrote.
Industry veterans, though, doubt Google will be able to buck Wall Street once it goes public.
"After the IPO, they're going to have to think in terms of predictable quarterly results and momentum," said Gordon Eubanks, who took software maker Symantec Corp. public in 1989 and now is CEO of Oblix Inc., a security startup. "You have to have a level of predictability and experience to warrant being a public company."
To insulate themselves from outside pressure, Page and Brin are creating a two-class stock hierarchy designed to give them effective veto power. The company is selling Class A common stock to the public, but Page and Brin will control Class B stock, which will have 10 times the voting power.
The setup is similar to systems used by several major media companies and Berkshire Hathaway Inc., run by stock market sage Warren Buffett.
Thursday's filing didn't spell out how large the founders' stakes will be after the offering, although they are listed as the company's largest individual shareholders. Both are expected to become billionaires after the IPO. Google paid each man $356,556 in salary and bonuses last year.
The filing also emphasized that both Page, 31, and Brin, 30, intend to remain Google's hands-on leaders, making all key decisions with CEO Eric Schmidt, a former top executive at Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc. who joined the company in 2001.
Google is already one of the world's best-known brands, with an online search engine that processes more than 200 million queries daily.
Despite its rapid success, Google faces an uncertain future as it tries to fend off stiffening competition from two much larger rivals, software giant Microsoft Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., which runs the world's most popular Web site.
Through February, Google held a 35 percent share of the search engine market, with Yahoo at 30 percent and Microsoft's MSN at 15 percent, according to comScore Networks, a research firm.
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864177/
Web portal for sale, slightly used
Last modified: April 27, 2004, 2:15 PM PDT
Spanish Internet company Terra Lycos has retained investment bank Lehman Brothers to explore a possible sale of its U.S. Internet business, including its flagship Lycos.com Web site, according to a document obtained by CNET News.com.
A sale of the unit, which is based in Waltham, Mass., would unwind the $12.5 billion merger of Lycos and Terra Networks, struck in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble. Now, with a resurgence of online advertising spending, Terra is seeking a buyer for the Lycos division as it focuses on its Spanish- and Portuguese-language businesses, according to the document, prepared by Lehman Brothers and circulated to prospective buyers over the past several weeks.
"An acquisition of Lycos, one of the last available premier Internet search and content properties, represents an outstanding and unique value creation opportunity at a time when advertising budgets are increasing, paid online content is gaining broader acceptance and public markets are favorably rewarding consolidation in the rapidly growing search market," the document reads.
Terra Lycos is hoping to sell Lycos for cash or liquid shares. Although no purchase price was listed, one source familiar with the deal said Terra Lycos is looking to sell Lycos for $200 million, based on $98 million in pro-forma revenue that the site generated in 2003.
A Terra Lycos representative declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Lehman Brothers did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
On the rebound
The effort to sell Lycos offers the latest evidence of the reviving fortunes of Internet companies, thanks to improved financial earnings and growing confidence in online advertising. Hype for the sector is set to soar this week, when Web search engine giant Google is expected to announce plans for an initial public offering, an event that could inspire a new round of dot-com deal-making.
Few expect a return to the heady days of the late 1990s, when Internet companies with no profits were sold for stock worth billions of dollars on paper. But excitement is building once again for Internet companies--particularly those with an angle on Web search.
Yahoo has led the way in deal-making to date, acquiring companies in the United States and abroad with stock and cash from a $2.79 billion war chest. In the past year, Yahoo has acquired paid-search company Overture Services for about $1.6 billion, French comparison shopping site Kelkoo for $579 million in cash and Chinese search company 3721 Network Software for $120 million.
The success of the paid-search business has sent the stocks of Internet search companies surging, including those of little-known players such as Mamma.com, whose shares jumped from about $2 in early March to more than $10. The company is backed by dot-com bubble investor extraordinaire Mark Cuban, who sold his Broadcast.com start-up to Yahoo in 1999 for stock worth more than $5 billion, and cashed out near the top.
War stories
The portal wars that marked the mid-1990s ended with Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft's MSN as the victors. Second-tier portals, such as Lycos, have remained popular according to online measurement firms, but their audiences are a fraction of the leaders'.
Walt Disney shut down Infoseek after spending billions of dollars trying to build out its own Go.com Web portal.
Excite.com, which was acquired by cable Internet service provider @Home for $6.7 billion in over-valued stock in 1999, was sold in 2001 in bankruptcy court for $10 million to online sweepstakes site iWon and Web directory InfoSpace.
Ask Jeeves in March said it is buying Interactive Search Holdings, owner of several destination sites including iWon, Excite and My Way, for about $343 million in cash and stock.
Terra Lycos is exploring a sale of its U.S. division following several rounds of layoffs and a recently announced restructuring that aims to refocus the company on search and its subscription businesses. According to the Lehman Bros. document, Lycos currently has about 170,000 paying subscribers for products including its Matchmaker online dating service.
Lycos lost $24 million in 2003, but broke even in the fourth quarter of that year, according to the Lehman document. The company expects to make a profit in 2004.
In February, Lycos laid off 20 percent of its U.S. staff and announced it would focus its business on the social-networking trend established by Friendster and Google's Orkut.com.
A year prior to that, Lycos had laid off 147 employees, 22 percent of the company, to refocus the company on a "global," rather than regional, scale. The company also said it would boost its collection of vertical sites.
Much of the trouble began in the fall of 2002 when German media giant Bertelsmann said it would renegotiate $675 million remaining from a $1 billion deal to buy in advertising as part of the Terra-Lycos merger. The renegotiation eventually lead to the departure of former U.S. head Stephen Killeen.
A baby boom?
Things are beginning to look up for Web businesses, however, thanks to renewed confidence in online advertising, bolstered by Web search. Lycos uses Google to post commercial links throughout its Web search results and gets a cut of revenue every time one of its users clicks on the link, something the Lehman Bros. bankers are counting on to lure in potential buyers.
Google and Yahoo subsidiary Overture have helped contribute significant amounts of cash to companies that use their search links. AOL, for instance, received $200 million in 2003 from revenue generated through its Google relationship, up from $35 million in 2002.
Lycos may also have some other assets that would interest potential buyers, such as its collection of various Web sites for certain categories. The company operates businesses such as Matchmaker.com for online personals, Quote.com for finance, Angelfire and Tripod for Web publishing, and Wired News. These businesses could be attractive for some potential suitors.
"Is it worth buying a second-tier portal? To the right buyer it may make a lot of sense," said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. "You can make a good living (even) if you're not the top player."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5201301.html?tag=nefd.lede
LOLLLL!!! What a splendid idea for a message board!!
Good thinking, Dave!
If you still can, Dave, perhaps you should change the name of the board to TUB.com and then ask Merrill Lynch if they're interested in bringing you new board to a Nasdaq IPO?
Just remind them that unless they give you a "STRONG BUY" rating, there's always Price Waterhouse Cooper... They'll get the message for sure...
ROTFL!!
KD
Here is some more Recent news
Philips losses mount on writedowns
Tuesday, February 11, 2003 Posted: 0707 GMT
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands (Reuters) -- Philips Electronics posted a higher-than-expected net loss for 2002 on Tuesday, due to bigger than expected charges, and said it expected no short-term improvement in the economic conditions.
Philips, Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics and lighting, booked a net loss of 3.21 billion euros. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected it to report a net loss of 3.16 billion to 1.45 billion euros, with consensus at 2.28 billion.
The result was dented by a write-down of 1.96 billion euros on equity stakes in Vivendi Universal as well as impairment charges of 1.31 billion euros for shareholdings in companies Atos Origin and LG Philips Displays.
Profit from operations in 2002, excluding the writedowns, came in at the high end of expectations at 420 million euros.
It was estimated by analysts at an average 334 million euros, with forecasts ranging between 112 and 448 million euros.
"I was pleasantly surprised by the operating profit, but there are some very serious impairment charges, even higher than I expected," said analyst Eric de Graaf at ING.
"On the operating front, lighting, domestic appliances and medical systems did better than expected, while the semiconductors figure is a major disappointment," he added.
Philips' chips unit, Europe's third largest, booked a 537 million euro operating loss in 2002 on sales of 4.61 billion.
Overall full year sales declined two percent to 31.8 billion euros as a result of weak end markets and a more expensive euro compared with the dollar.
Philip issued no outlook for 2003 or the first quarter, considering the current economic and political uncertainties.
"We move into 2003 focused on improving profitable operational performance," Chief Executive Gerard Kleisterlee said in a statement.
Philips shares are up 15 percent since October when technology stocks troughed, in line with peers in the Dow Jones Eurotech index.
Since December, when a rally based on 2003 recovery hopes peaked, Philips shares are down 35 percent.
Heard on the radio there were $400B in Internet Writedowns
And that was just in 2003. Here are just a few of them from 2002. Will Abby's predictions hold true for 2003 also? :^)
Don't Write Off Writedowns
David Simons, 01.31.02, 8:00 AM ET
Goldman Sachs guru Abby Joseph Cohen said not to worry about her Jan. 24 estimate that massive writedowns of acquisitions and other bull-market asset excess will cut into 2002 earnings of S&P 500 companies by 35%. Ms. Cohen maintained her year-end price target of 1,300 to 1,425 for the index. She noted that the writedowns would be excluded as special charges from the earnings Wall Street analysts look at. But don't ignore the writedowns. What's behind them can give clues about future performance of the companies doing the cutting.
A full-color preview of the 2002 action came last July when telecom-equipment maker JDS Uniphase (nasdaq: JDSU - news - people ) announced a $46.6 billion haircut of $61.4 billion worth of deals done near the peak of the bubble.
Based upon the acquired companies' quarterly reports just prior to the deal closings, JDS Uniphase paid a princely 43 times the combined $1.4 billion of their annualized revenue, and a drunken maharajah multiple of 156 times the combined earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Annualized net losses totaled $330 million.
Accounting rules require a writedown if the fair value of an acquisition or investment has fallen significantly and, in bean-counter lingo, the decline is deemed "other than temporary," meaning fat chance that it will recover. The implosion of the telecom sector clearly had made the JDS Uniphase acquisitions fit that bill.
Yet within four days of the writedown announcement, JDS Uniphase shares had more than made up a brief 10% reflex dip. Investors took the perspective, also espoused by the company, that the writedown didn't matter because JDS Uniphase had merely overpaid for the companies with overpriced stock. Had the deals been done after the bubble had burst, they say, the amounts subject to writeoff would have been smaller or nonexistent.
Apart from being a shaky rationale for overpaying, the logic ignores significant implications of the nuts and bolts of the writedown process.
What's written down is goodwill--the difference between the purchase price and the book value of what was acquired. Investors often downplay goodwill, because in accounting terms it's deemed an "intangible asset."
But the prescribed method chosen by JDS Uniphase to compute the writedown is quite tangible. The present value of cash flows from the acquired businesses over the next five years was estimated. The difference between that and the goodwill that hadn't already been amortized was written off.
In doing so, JDS Uniphase was saying that five-year cash flows from the acquired businesses would be $4 billion, rather than the $57 billion implied by the acquisition prices. So much for the common perspective that the goodwill "intangible" is merely a plug factor to make accounting statements balance.
Of course, much of that cash-flow deficit was reflected by the bubble-bursting of JDS Uniphase stock and the waterfall decline of the bottom line from a best-face $137 million pro-forma profit in the June 2000 quarter to a $477 million loss a year later.
Still, the assumptions JDS Uniphase used to arrive at the cash flow were optimistic. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company said it used annual growth rates of 15% to 60%, and a 13.75% average discount rate. The discount rate is supposed to reflect the risk in the growth rate. Nortel Networks (nyse: NT - news - people ) used a 20% discount rate in arriving at a $12.4 billion June writedown of four bull-market acquisitions. The JDS Uniphase discount was more appropriate to a cement plant than to a supplier of new-age telecom gear looking for double-digit growth in an uncertain sales climate.
The company warned in SEC filings, "It is reasonably possible that the estimates and assumptions used...may change in the near term, resulting in the need to further write down our goodwill." In other words, the cash flows from the acquisitions would be even less.
Investors who dismissed the writedowns as irrelevant probably also ignored the implication of that warning. Sure enough, on Jan. 24, JDS Uniphase announced a $1.3 billion downward adjustment of the writedowns, amidst a companywide revenue decline of 52% since they were first made.
At the least, the warnings and the aggressive calculations that preceded it signaled that JDS Uniphase remained prone to overly optimistic projection. Then, in its Jan. 24 earnings announcement, the company recanted its estimate made only a month earlier that the March quarter would mark the low point of declining sales.
Nortel's writedown was more conclusive at the outset. It wiped out the 90% that remained of $14 billion goodwill from $17 billion of bubble-era outlays for three companies. That translates to estimated cash flow generated over five years being 78% less than what Nortel paid.
Fiber-optic king Corning's (nyse: GLW - news - people ) June writedown of its September 2000 deal to buy Optical Technologies USA shows just how tangible goodwill can be. In the nine months prior to the deal, Optical Technologies had lost $5.6 million on $17 million in sales. Corning paid $4 billion--176 times the annualized sales--and paid not in stock but in cold cash. The writedown reduced the value to $800,000, meaning that Corning literally had done the equivalent of totaling 80,000 brand new Cadillacs.
Hello all my once time old "INTERNET INVESTING" friends!
Well, it looks to me as though the past has finally come back to haunt us all. Witness it by reading the following article. We see evidence of old quiet and seemingly dieing Internet Companies gobbling up lesser Internet Companies!
Let the Gobbling Begin!
Is this the beginning of Phase Two of The Internet Phenomena?
Read On!
By Lisa Baertlein
PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Internet search company Overture Services Inc. (OVER) on Tuesday said it would buy Web portal AltaVista from CMGI Inc. (CMGI) in a $140 million deal aimed at boosting its own ``competitive advantages.´´
Overture, which gives advertisers a way to bid for well-placed spots among Web search results distributed to partners like Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN, agreed to pay AltaVista with common stock currently worth $80 million plus $60 million in cash. It also said it would assume some of AltaVista's liabilities.
AltaVista's selling price is a far cry from the last one fetched by company, which is best known for being one of the first to offer an easy way to search the Web.
In 1999, now-struggling CMGI paid Compaq Computer Corp. $2.3 billion for an 83 percent stake in Palo Alto, California-based AltaVista. Compaq has since merged with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ)
Overture shares shed 8 percent of their value on the after-hours news, falling to $20.90 from their Nasdaq close of $22.79. Shares of CMGI, formerly a high-flying Internet holding company, jumped nearly 22 percent to $1.01 after finishing the regular Nasdaq session at 83 cents.
U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy said AltaVista has solid core technology and plenty of patents, but hasn't done a great job lately of translating those assets into products.
``There´s a chance for Overture to rejuvenate that potential,´´ Rashtchy told Reuters.
The acquisition, which is slated to close in April, is expected to be ``dilutive in the near term,´´ Overture Chief Financial Officer Todd Tappin said during a conference call with analysts.
Tappin declined to update Overture's guidance, saying the Pasadena, California, company was still working out integration plans and future strategies.
Nevertheless, Overture said it sees the purchase adding to earnings by mid-2004.
COMPETITIVE QUESTIONS
Competitive questions have been front and center in analysts' minds since Yahoo announced late last month that it had hired Overture's vice president of search to do the same job in its search unit.
Although both companies have said their relationship remains strong, some analysts have speculated that Yahoo might be exploring the creation of its own internal paid-search products.
``We were not motivated to act by other external factors,´´ Overture President and Chief Executive Ted Meisel said during the company conference call.
``We do not believe we are creating a competitor for our partners,´´ he added.
Meisel said the tie-up would help Overture strengthen its offerings, allow the company to syndicate AltaVista's advanced algorithmic search technology that scours the Web for answers to users' queries, and give Overture a place to test new products and services before rolling them out to partners.
MSN declined comment through a spokeswoman.
Representatives from Yahoo were not immediately available for comment.
Rashtchy said Overture's move ``chips away a little bit´´ at the company´s assertion that it´s not competing with its partners.
He did, however, say that the purchase will likely be the first of many mergers and acquisitions in the search space.
``There is going to be a lot of activity. This is just the beginning; by no means is the landscape settled yet.´´
© 2003 Reuters
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