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At this week’s D6 trade conference a question was asked of Rupert Murdoch about Carl Icahn’s grab at Yahoo.  Mr. Murdoch, often frank and to the point, replied “that’s not serious. He just wants to make a few hundred million bucks.”

Accurate or off base, one mogul’s insight on another is always fascinating.  Here, I’d suspect the conclusion is true as well.  Icahn is a special kind of value investor – he looks for corporate weakness and tries to turn it into short term investment opportunity.  He’s an opportunist imbued with the mentality of a trader, together mixed in with the instinct of a predator and the guile of a poker player.  He’s honed his game over years of practice.  The playbook is in memory; tried and true.  Yahoo, as a target,  was looking weak.  The opportunity was there.

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In a year where gaming companies seem to be shattering records at every turn, another stellar result no longer comes as a surprise but is instead, an expectation.  French game publisher Ubisoft didn’t disappoint Thursday.  Even after upping expectations several times in the past year (most recently in March) the company reported fiscal yearend earnings that raised the bar even higher.

By the numbers: Click to Read More

Where there is smoke there is usually fire.  A similar maxim is often true with investors: where one big name goes, others usually follow.  It’s something of a law of opportunity, an investor piggy-back clause.  People follow success and will ride its coattails. So where Warren Buffet invests, others follow. Where Icahn goes, others go too.  With Yahoo the bulls eye in Icahn’s game du jour, that’s not good news for the company’s management.

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When Wired magazine came on the scene it was the essence of Geek Chic.  It was business news for the up and comer, forward looking journalism for the techno Internet industrialists.   Founded in 1993, the magazine was quick to draw raves, winning industry awards for design and general excellence.  It set a standard for innovation and vision.  Then the Internet bubble burst.  Along with it, the audience of need-to-know-know news hungry entrepreneurs shrank.   Advertisers had less interest to spend.  To survive, Wired evolved and sought new readers.  While peers like Industry Standard and Business 2.0 stayed their courses and shuttered, Wired became more mainstream, broader.  With a wider, more diverse audience, the property survived the crash, even weathered through complex ownership  issues (Wired.com and Wired magazine shared content but had different owners from 1998 to 2006).  Along the way, however, Wired lost some of its “Silicon Street” credibility.

Over the past two years, Advance.net, Wired’s owner, has moved to restore some of that digital cache. Click to Read More

The big merger news this week was supposed to come Friday with the expiration date of Electronic Arts hostile takeover for Take Two.  Unfortunately, a number of people didn’t get the memo.  Instead, Thursday became the big day for M&A activity with not one but two major announcements lighting up the news wires. 

On one front, CBS stepped up to rescue CNET from the grips of activist shareholders by means of a $1.8billion cash tender offer.  Elsewhere, financier Carl Icahn went public with his plans for Yahoo.  He’ll begin the process Microsoft was unwilling to initiate: a tender offer to take control of Yahoo’s board of directors.

Three major deals in a week – two of them hostile and one something of a white knight rescue… it almost seems like we’ve slid back to the 80’s. Click to Read More

Carl Icahn today made his interest in Yahoo official.  More details on the proxy fight can be found in the related summary article here on Metue. Here, reprinted in entirety are the letters exchanged between Carl Icahn, initiating the attack, and Yahoo’s Roy Bostock, acknowledging it. (Biographies of his proposed board slate are available here).

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With the proxy fight officially initiated, Carl Icahn attached his nominees for Yahoo’s board to his letter to Roy Bostock. The full list of candidates, which mix former executives like Mark Cuban  (Broadcast.com and HD Net) , John Chapple (Nextel)  and Frank Biondi (Viacom) along with a number of professional investors is reprinted below along with biographies for each candidate.

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