In the summer of last year, BladeLogic (NASDAQ: BLOG) launched its IPO, which skyrocketed nearly 50%. It helped that one of its main rivals, Opsware, get a $1.65 billion buyout offer from Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ).
Well, BladeLogic has now agreed to sell out, although at a lower valuation: $800 million. The buyer is tech veteran, BMC Software (NYSE: BMC).
BladeLogic is focused on helping to deal with the mind-numbing complexities of data centers, helping with things like compliance, downtime, speed and so on. Keep in mind that there's about $140 billion spent on data centers per year.
At the same time, over the past few years, BMC has done a good job restructuring its company. Now it's in a position to ramp growth – and BladeLogic will be a nice boost. In fiscal Q1, the company's revenues spiked 68% to $21.4 million.
Although, Wall Street is skeptical. In today's trading, BMC's stock is down 7% to $31.31.
I often spend a little time over at Blogmaverick.com, where Mark Cuban recently sought to give the world of blogging a little of his insightful perspective. It seems that Mr. Cuban finds little to respect in the world of blogging, or at least in the world of slipshod ,cookie-cutter blogging. Though I found Mark's blog entry a trifle difficult to read, which is quite unusual coming from him, I nonetheless agree with most of the body of his post. I especially agree with his assertion that just because a blog is backed by the name of a well-known media organization does not in itself render that blog worthy of special notice.
Mark Cuban wrote, "...newspapers having 'bloggers' is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years." If newspapers are going in a wrong direction by producing blogs, perhaps they need to reinstall the title reporter and drop the title blogger to give a different perspective to the reader. If newspapers are using the term blog simply as a culture hook, then they have it all wrong and they're just selling their reporters short. I believe that I'm in agreement with Mark Cuban when I say that true reporters should be releasing content within some format other than blogs. Blogging is what I do, and I'll be the first to tell you that I'm no reporter. The titles are absolutelynot interchangeable, though they may sometimes be used correctly in tandem.
MOST NOTEWORTHY: Linc Energy, Equinix and Smith & Wesson were today's noteworthy initiations:
Merriman initiated Linc Energy (OTC: LNCGY) with a Buy rating and believes the company is well-positioned to become a large producer of ultra-clean, high quality diesel fuel, at extremely high margins.
Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX) was assumed with a Buy rating and $120 target at Deutsche Bank. The firm thinks the company continues to benefit from favorable industry dynamics as customer demand continues to outstrip supply of new co-location space industry-wide.
Susquehanna is positive on Smith & Wesson's (NASDAQ: SWHC) leading market position in the handgun market and top line growth. The firm started shares with a Positive rating.
OTHER INITIATIONS:
ComScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) was reinstated with an Outperform rating at Credit Suisse.
UBS initiated Willbros Group (NYSE: WG) with a Buy rating and $4 target.
Lazard started BladeLogic (NASDAQ: BLOG) with a Hold rating.
A WSJ.com survey found that economists are more optimistic about the economy and see a lessening chance of a recession, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The WSJ also reported that a jury in Nevada awarded $134.5M to three women who said hormone therapy drugs manufactured by Wyeth (NYSE: WYE), including Prempro and Premarin, caused their breast cancer.
OTHER PAPERS:
The SEC began an inquiry into oversight of the New York State pension fund. The SEC is trying to find out if civil violations of federal securities laws were committed, the New York Times reported.
Over 90,000 children's products imported by J.C. Penny Company (NYSE: JCP) from China, Taiwan and Vietnam, were recalled because of dangerous levels of lead, the Associated Press reported.
WEB SITES:
Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) said on its blog that it has improved its service for the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges by providing pricing data in real time and hopes the SEC will approve their "Last Sale" proposal, which would allow users free and unlimited access to real-time last sale prices for the NYSE and Nasdaq stocks.
MOST NOTEWORTHY: European banks, Voltaire, Perfect World and Aspreva Pharmaceuticals were today's noteworthy initiations:
Morgan Stanley assumed coverage of Credit Suisse Group (NYSE: CS) with an Overweight rating, Deutsche Bank AG (NYSE: DB) with an Equal Weight rating and UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) with an Underweight rating.
Voltaire Ltd (NASDAQ: VOLT) was started with a Buy rating and $29 target at Goldman Sachs, with a Neutral rating at JP Morgan, with an Overweight rating and $12 target at Thomas Weisel and with an Outperform rating and $15 target at RBC Capital. Thomas Weisel said the market gives Voltaire very little credit for its strong position in the rapidly growing Infiniband switch market and RBC Capital believes the stock has impressive growth and gross margin momentum.
Perfect World Co Ltd (NASDAQ: PWRD) was initiated with a Positive rating at Susquehanna, as the firm is positive on its growth potential in the online gaming industry in China.
Aspreva Pharmaceuticals Corporation (NASDAQ: ASPV) was initiated with a Sector Perform at RBC Capital, as the firm believes the current valuation is not attractive, and recommends $17 as an attractive entry point. The firm set a target of $22 on the shares.
OTHER INITIATIONS:
Drugstore.com Inc (NASDAQ: DSCM) was started with a Market Perform rating at JMP Securities.
Wachovia started shares of BladeLogic Inc (NASDAQ: BLOG) with an Outperform rating and $17 target. The stock was also initiated at Morgan Stanley with an Equal Weight rating and at Citigroup with a Hold rating and $27.50 target.
Those of you who have been interested in blogs for several years are probably well aware of the company Technorati. This website made a splash by becoming the first market-share dominator in the entire Web 2.0 space, especially in the blog search engine space. But times have changed and Technorati is struggling to hold on.
The situation in Technorati is quickly shifting to more difficult, seemingly by the day. As TheDeal.com reported on Friday, the founding CEO of the company recently stepped down. In addition, the company has been forced to recently slash eight jobs to adjust the company's expense structure. Perhaps the most startling of it all -- Technorati is quickly losing its dominant market share position.
According to research firm Hitwise, Technorati's number one market share position is now just secured by 1%. The company currently stands at 34% of the blog search market, while Google's blog search product is a strong and growing 33%.
As you can see from the chart below (courtesy of Alexa.com), Technorati's page views figures are well off of their peak. Understandably, this traffic decline has been a huge catalyst to a weakening position in the blog search market, as well as financial difficulties, because for most internet companies, traffic is everything.
Bear Stearns Companies Inc (NYSE: BSC) will reinforce the risk controls in its money management unit following the meltdown of two of its internal hedge funds tied to subprime loans, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Consumers are going to buy many more large liquid crystal display, or LCD, flat screen TVs than large plasma flat screen TVs, reported the Financial Times.
OTHER PAPERS:
News Corporation (NYSE: NWS) has acquired two weekly newspapers in the Bronx, The Bronx Times and The Bronx Times Reporter, reported the New York Times.
Google Inc (NADSAQ: GOOG) has announced the acquisition of start-up company GrandCentral Communications on its official blog website, Google.Blogspot.com.
What best symbolizes what went wrong at Yahoo Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO)? How it handled the rise of financial blogging.
When looking up stock quotes on Yahoo Finance, there is a financial blog section -- but it only publishes blogs from Seeking Alpha and no one else. Why? Because Terry Semel, Yahoo's ousted CEO, applied the old-boys media network model to Internet programming -- partner with large and well-established media companies and split up the profits. Did this work? No.
"In Web 1.0, the publisher told you what to read, in web 2.0, the consumer is the boss," said Andy Monfried, president and founder of LOTAME, in a recent interview on Wallstrip.com. Monfried was a top executive at Advertising.com which he helped build into the leading third party advertising network which is now part of AOL.
"Click through rates and brand methods do not apply any more. The cost to buy the media from social media networks is so much less than portals and other resources that have content. Going forward, advertising is all about user-generated content," Monfried noted.
LOTAME stands for Local Target Media and wants to be the connector between local social content and advertisers such as a Myspace or Facebook with the local pizza guy or the national advertiser. Yahoo has preached for years of its desire to be the leader in bringing the Internet advertising model to the local guy, but it never succeeded. It is the user-generated content that is the missing link for success in this area and Semel never got it.
Yahoo is in big trouble. Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) figured out what was going to work and has won Web 2.0. For Yahoo to succeed it will have to find something it can do differently than Google, possibly aligning with Myspace.com, which was speculated yesterday on CNBC.
From an investment perspective, Yahoo's real estate position on the web is too big to pass up on. The Fly has blogged endlessly for the past year of Yahoo being a value stock and investors should jump into it and put it away. Our stance remains the same. A successfully run Yahoo has the potential to generate some big returns for shareholders.
The Observer reported that a private equity consortium is considering a $15 billion offer for Virgin Media Inc (NASDAQ: VMED).
Cadbury Schweppes ADS (NYSE: CSG) is planning to return £5 billion to shareholders through a special dividend or share buyback, according to The Observer.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) will offer to buy out the pension schemes of some of the leading FTSE100 companies next week.
Yahoo! Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO) may be looking to acquire British social networking site Bebo, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The Bollywood film producer, Eros International, is expected to announce a partnership with Google Inc's (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The Orange County Register blog looked at a transcript from IndyMac Bancorp Inc's (NYSE: IMB) first quarter conference call, where the CEO Michael Perry said: "When you see that delinquency number in the press of 13% subprime delinquencies, it's hugely understated. It is absolutely hugely understated. And the prime delinquencies are overstated. The subprime delinquencies are more like 18, 20, 22% delinquencies and that's where I think you're going to see the problems."
Understand that Engadget is our sister blog, a star in the AOL constellation, with great writers that push the envelope every day to bring readers the very latest, hottest tech news. Yesterday, that drive came back to bite them in the ass when, acting on a tip from a reliable source, they blogged, and then were forced to retract, a story that the Apple iPhone rollout was going to be delayed.
Unfortunately, in the interval, Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s stock lost an estimated $4 billion in about six minutes. Within half an hour of the blog's retraction, the stock had recovered almost its full value.
Heinrich von Pierer resigned as chairman of Siemens AG ADR's (NYSE: SI) supervisory board amid criminal bribery probes, reported the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
Are recruiters using Technorati or other blog search tools to find talent? So says the Wall Street Journal in today's paper, pointing out how blogging used to be a screening tool (maybe you shouldn't have gone on that rant about your ex-girlfriend...) but has become, for many more mature members of the job pool, a gold mine. That "about me" page does have some use after all, and many blogs I've visited have a standard resume format where the ironic sideways self-portrait, list of favorite songs and stats on children and puppies usually go.
Who would hire from a blog, and what kind of people, exactly, might they hire? The WSJ uses Ryan Loken, a recruiter at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT), as an example; he says he's hired about 125 people because of their blogs, but doesn't say in which departments.
You might expect graphic designers and web developers to be frequently hired because of their blogs and fun little "side" projects -- and they are, it's true, but don't decide to stick to anonymity on your blog just because you're not in a high-tech field. I'm in (variously) product development, parenting and financial writing, and photography, and all my interests have inspired the occasional recruiter contact to my personal blog address (but, for the record, I'm sticking with this job!). The companies they represented were ones you'd never think of: packaged goods, wireless phones, organic farms. I've found great candidates for contract writing positions in everything from scrapbooking to cooking to living a simpler life through the blogosphere, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Blogging is an invaluable way to showcase one's expertise in any area, from keeping chickens to CSS design to technical stock analysis, and it's becoming, more and more, the leading way to see and be seen. Networking clubs and who-you-know? Passé. It's about how well you SEO. And I could write a whole separate post on that...
Firemeg, who, if the name is any indication, is not a supporter of eBay CEO Meg Whitman, provided this well-thought out response to a blog I wrote on eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY). Firemeg made some interesting points.
Firemeg said: In its current state, I would never buy ebay stock to hold onto. The numbers you have given are straight from eBay's mouth. 220 million users? I have about 30 eBay ID's, how many unique users are there and how many new unique members were there in 2006, and how many of them were active on the site? - Those numbers mean a lot more than the number of users.171 mil Skype users? Same here, how many signed up as paying customers? Since subscriptions were $15 or $30 for the year, and only $65 million was generated in the Q4, it's obvious that most users did not subscribe (especially when you figure that part of that revenue was generated in per minute calling).Shopping.com is a very low traffic site without very good user reviews.Right now eBay is deriving much of its growth from fee increases and listing sales. Add the Skype subscriptions to the listings sales and fee increases and subtract them from the revenue and I'd bet you would see a loss.
My only criticism is that the response could have avoided hyperbole. Although most users have multiple accounts, having 30 user accounts is a bit unusual.
Regarding Skype, applying annual subscription fees of $15 to $30 per year and applying that to only $65 million in revenue (or $250 million annualized) brings you to about 8.3 million paying users--well below the 171 million registered users that eBay management cited. However, management said during the conference call that it has not done a good job monetizing Skype yet and that it will be an area of focus in 2007. This means there is upside here, as Skype is very much in the early stage of its evolution.
Regarding eBay's growth being due to increased fees and listing sales, that was a clearly a defined management strategy during 2006 -- to keep the more profitable sellers and squeeze out the marginal ones, or money losing sellers. Success in this strategy should be seen in margins, which was the case in the December quarter results.
We will see who proves correct by eBay's stock performance during the next twelve months. Please keep the comments coming!
Insider Blogging looks at the blogs about our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."
I'm what you might call a First Amendment scholar, having taken law-school-level courses on the subject and researched a number of such cases for my various, data-rich employers. And even though I'm a political liberal, I have a bias against extending "privacy" laws to online behavior, especially when said online behavior is conducted on very public services. I just don't agree that there is a "compelling interest" in protecting one's search behavior, especially if it can't be definitively traced back to the individual. In a free society, private enterprises should be able to do whatever they wish with the information you type into their tools; unless they've told you otherwise. In my opinion? Your behavior on a search engine is just as protectable as anything else you do in the public realm; what groceries you purchase, for instance, or what car you drive.
So I'm entirely not shocked that AOL put a bunch of customer search data (without, it must be noted, any identifying information about who did the searching) online 10 days ago. Now, apologies have been issued ("This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset," says a spokesperson). I seem to be in the minority, however; the internet, it is horrified.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch seems to be most shocked, saying that "The utter stupidity of this is staggering ," [emphasis his] and he claims that "the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to ... many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with "buy ecstasy" and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."
Wow. That's a bit inflammatory, Michael, don't you think?
I participated in a panel discussion at a conference on Saturday with a couple of young, smart, geeky teenagers -- i.e., the absolute center of most marketers' universe. These girls, Iris and Sheena, were the very definition of "early adopter" and "Generation Y" all rolled into one, a tiny yet brilliant focus group on the future of technology, social networking, and the internet.
Someone asked if Iris had a blog, and she said, "I hate to say this, but [pause] MySpace." She and Sheena both related how they checked out their MySpace accounts daily to see if friends had tried to contact them. For the two of them, both from lower-income families and members of under-represented minority groups, their technology lives consisted of homework, their podcasts, and MySpace.
If I were less of an analytical sort, I'd immediately say that MySpace is clearly winning the social networking arena. The site has the teenagers! What's more, it has hours each day of attention from these girls, from my youngest sister, my babysitter -- all of the 13- to 25-year-old demographic, really. But then I thought for an instant more, and I realized that Iris and Sheena were both the perfect example of MySpace's market domination and the reason why Microsoft, AOL, and Google will always win the race for ad dollars.
There's no money in these teenagers' MySpace behavior.
In the summer of last year, BladeLogic (NASDAQ: BLOG) launched its IPO, which skyrocketed nearly 50%. It helped that one of its main rivals, Opsware, get a $1.65 billion buyout offer from Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ).
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Understand that Engadget is our sister blog, a star in the AOL constellation, with great writers that push the envelope every day to bring readers the very latest, hottest tech news. Yesterday, that drive came back to bite them in the ass when, acting on a tip from a reliable source, they blogged, and then were .gif){kind=logo}
Are recruiters using Technorati or other blog search tools to find talent? So 
Insider Blogging looks at the blogs about our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."
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