Two companies addressing two different aspects of the online video marketplace – live content interactivity and broader, high quality video distribution – both announced financing news Monday. For San Mateo based Conviva, it was a $20m Series B Financing. For Utah based Move Networks, it was news that Microsoft was joining prior Series C investors with an undisclosed strategic investment.
Apple’s broken sales records in many of their recent quarters including the last but when forecasts were given for the current quarter, Apple was particularly conservative. Citing a “product transition” widely believed to involve Macbook notebooks, the company forecast only a Q4 earnings result of $1 per share on sales of $7.8b. Analysts were looking for $1.24 a share on sales of $8.3b. Midway through the quarter, some analysts are now starting to set out projections that turn Apple’s conservatism upside down.
Yahoo’s proxy fight is over, the board seats have been filled, and the disruption of Microsoft’s bid seems past, but there continues to be some attrition at senior roles. The report today is that Yahoo’s senior vice president Todd Teresi, who’s headed the Publisher Channel for the last year, will jump ship to join Web site metrics firm Quantcast.
At Yahoo, Teresi was responsible for managing off-network partnerships. He was at Yahoo for about ten years. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was a founding member of the high-technology mergers and acquisitions practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Convergence is the keyword and just about every media and technology company with a chip in the game is betting on it through some form of technology or content integration. Wednesday at the Intel Developers Conference, the biggest news among many announcements was the surprise pitch that Intel and Yahoo are joining together in a tie-up aimed at grabbing one of the biggest prizes: the marriage of Internet interactivity and traditional TV. They’re calling the offering “Widget Channel.”
Yahoo today confirmed the appointment of two board members to fill the seats pledged in the settlement of their proxy fight with Carl Icahn. With front runner Jonathan Miller sidelined due to a non-compete agreement with his former employer, Yahoo named Frank Biondi and John Chapple to their board. Each of the new appointees will bring different credentials to the table. More on each:
The merits of unconditional giving aside, if you build something and decide to give it away, decide to put it into the public domain, can you attach strings to the gift? Can you set rules that stick with your invention and continually govern how it will be used from owner to owner to owner? And if those rules aren’t’ followed is the violation copyright infringement? In a ruling deciding a case addressing the enforceability of open-source software licenses, Wednesday the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said yes. The decision reversed a San Francisco Federal Court ruling.
To many, the news may seem like an insignificant, or esoteric, legal discussion. The Open-Source community, which was rallying for the result, would argue otherwise. Click to Read More
Yesterday’s “Applevine” post on Metue summarized some of the current Apple reports and rumors circling the news world. One of the elements included was a recap, and light review, of newly reported data on how the new iPhone supporting “App Store” is doing. The numbers were impressive and there is clearly great potential but the take here was cautionary; a bias toward pragmatism with predictions. One month seems too slight a sample to use for accurately forecasting revenue growth or impact on EPS. A few raised flags of dissent.
One comment speculatively said the store could be a 80 to 85 percent gross margin business. Another said that the store could add as much as ten or twenty cents to quarterly earnings per share. Those numbers weren’t supported. They were just “pie in the sky claims,” but still they are out there and they beg a question: what’s the App Store potentially worth – not qualitatively, not from a behavioral analysis, not from a zealous Apple fan, nor from a detractor – simply by the numbers. If we set aside the opinion that one month of data is too little to be meaningful and use it anyway, if we break out the Graham & Dodd, fire up the spreadsheets, how much of a contribution could the App Store make to Apple’s bottom line if the current levels are annualized? It’s got a great revenue story but how much for earnings?
How much might the App Store contribute to earnings per share if the store’s revenue grows to $500m, or passes $1 Billion?
What might it mean to Apple shareholders on a standalone basis that disregards the store’s greater contribution as a driver of iPhone (and iPod Touch) sales?
There’s no easy answers, but in this post we’re going to try and set out a framework for looking at it – a way of adding numbers to wild speculation.
