The company said it will use the funds to boost marketing so it can further compete against brick-and-mortar retailers that sell extended warranties to customers at their stores. Best Buy Co., for example, offers warranties and repairs through its Geek Squad business.

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What an amazing coincidence.

On the very day Yahoo’s board is considering actual bids from two private equity firms interested in deals to buy close to 20 percent of the company for between $16.50 and $17.50 a share, comes a spate of eerily similar breathless media postings that there’s another bid in the making for $20!

That’s totes better, right? I mean, how can Yahoo’s directors accept a real live lesser-priced bid now when there’s a prettier one in the fog just ahead?

No, really, it’s there — if you squint really, really hard.

Except it’s not even close, when you actually check with two of the key members of the group of alleged buyers, which would apparently be Blackstone, Bain Capital and Yahoo’s Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank.

Sources close to Blackstone and Alibaba said while there have been talks, which have been previously reported weeks ago here and elsewhere, there is no bid in the offing that is close to fruition and at that price.

In an unusual public statement, in fact, Alibaba’s John Spelich said flatly: “Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole-company bid for Yahoo.”

This from a company whose voluble CEO Jack Ma is prone to making giant and noisy speeches to signal his interest in finding a way — any way — to get back shares of the Chinese Internet giant from Yahoo.

Not this time, and several sources close to Alibaba reiterated that it was nowhere near close to any bid as yet and that a price is still up in the air. In addition, sources added, Alibaba might decide to work with another PE group, such as Providence Equity.

In addition, sources noted that if Alibaba could strike an adequate deal with private equity bidders to get a large chunk of the stake back, it would be highly preferable to a hostile takeover of Yahoo that could end in tears and little else.

“The threat of a takeover is more useful than the damage an actual takeover would cause for everyone,” said one person close to the situation. “No one wants this to be unfriendly.”

So why the rumors — doubtlessly being spread around by hopelessly cynical Wall Street types interested only in stock manipulation — surfacing today?

Simple: To get some easy-to-play media outlet to bite, report it as speculative fact and cause the stock of Yahoo to take flight tomorrow.

Hey, it could happen!

Sadly, this junior-league trick has already worked — Yahoo shares were up a dollar to $16.72 in after-hours trading tonight.

It is likely to go even higher tomorrow, which could cause the board of Yahoo to delay accepting either of the partial bids from Silver Lake or TPG Capital, even if they were the best thing for the company and its employees.

Except that the job of the Yahoo board is to evaluate what’s before them and not what is perhaps, someday, soon, wait-by-the-phone, really soon, I promise is going to be delivered.

In fact, several sources noted that it’s not clear if the Yahoo board has even asked for parties to submit whole-company bids yet.

When and if Yahoo’s board does that and if something better actually does come down the pike, with a much fatter price tag of $20 or more, then the directors can mull that over.

That would be the prudent thing to do for the company, its employees and its shareholders, even if Yahoo’s stock gets a temporary lift now.

Maybe I am just a hopeless Silicon Valley romantic and not a hardened Wall Street M&A type, but the survival of Yahoo is the real point here, rather than the lining of bankers’ already fee-stuffed pockets.

And anything other than that is just fog.

One of Yahoo’s biggest problems — brain drain — has turned out to be an asset for private equity firms and other players interested in figuring out their best moves related to the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

A plethora of ex-Yahoos, including many former top execs, are getting buttonholed by those who want to know more about the inner workings of the company that might not be obvious from its copious financial data available publicly.

That includes former Americas head Hilary Schneider, who has a longer-term consulting gig with TPG Capital, one of the several PE firms that has recently signed a non-disclosure agreement with Yahoo; former COO and President Sue Decker, who has had a longtime informal relationship with Blackstone, which has not signed the NDA and has been in talks with Yahoo’s Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank; and even former CEO Carol Bartz, who sources say has also been contacted to get her insights.

She is one of many in that regard, in a large pool of former Yahoos, such as: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who had run Yahoo’s media efforts; Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, former Yahoo COO; SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, who ran swathes of Yahoo’s entertainment properties; Criteo CEO Greg Coleman, former Yahoo sales head; former CEO Terry Semel, who is now an investor; former communications exec Brad Garlinghouse, who is now at AOL; and Demand Media Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford, who also was a top Yahoo advertising exec.

Not all are cooperating with the requests for a chitchat about Yahoo, but there is much incoming interest in ex-Yahoos and what they might know.

There’s lots more where that came from, from all parts and all levels of Yahoo, given the breadth of the exes now doing very well — thank you very much — throughout the tech and media industries.

Thus, calls from PE firms, from Silver Lake to Bain Capital to Providence Equity Partners, as well as interest from major and majorly irritated shareholders, such as activist hedge fund investor Dan Loeb.

It’s a smart idea to tap this rich vein of information, as all contemplate possible multi-billion-dollar investments.

While some of these execs have not worked at Yahoo in many years, all have significant knowledge about the challenges and also the culture that cannot be gleaned from spreadsheets.

They also know a lot about the internal politics and personalities of the existing inside players, too. More importantly, several were involved in similar previous major business decisions at Yahoo.

Decker, for example, was a key exec in the Yahoo takeover attempt by Microsoft several years ago; Schneider and Bartz were deeply involved in striking the advertising and search partnership with Microsoft.

“Between everyone, it’s a good way to figure out where all the bodies are buried,” said one person close to the situation. “And there are a lot of bodies.”

Score one for Yahoo, it seems, getting some key private equity firms to sign its restrictive non-disclosure agreement to allow them a special peek at its business.

And now that includes Silver Lake, which has already had several discussions with Yahoo management and its board members, including co-founder Jerry Yang.

Silver Lake, which has perhaps been among the more aggressive of the possible bidders for Yahoo, had been a significant holdout over the NDA, because of provisions it felt were too onerous.

That included restricting “cross-talk” among the variety of suitors interested. Sources said Silver Lake had been discussing various scenarios related to Yahoo that might take a consortium of players to realize.

It seems it will agree to none of that, for now at least, joining several others who have also signed on the dotted line of secrecy. While Yahoo could have agreed to changes in the NDA, sources said the one Silver Lake agreed to was the same as others previously signed.

Those NDA-ready PE firms include TPG Capital and KKR. As of today, other bidders — such as Providence Equity Partners, Bain Capital, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman — have not yet signed the document.

Yahoo had extended a deadline for doing to into this week, but firms can also get involved in later rounds of talks.

In addition, signing the NDA is not the end of the road for those who do not — Yahoo is a prominent public company and there are plenty of sources to talk to about its prospects.

But getting cooperation of Yahoo management could be critical, unless a bidder is contemplating making an unsolicited offer.

And that would be a tough road — just ask Microsoft.

Most of all, getting everyone to sign is important for Yahoo, which wants to control any sales or investment process and wants to avoid bidders taking control of its fate.

Thus, Silver Lake accepting the NDA is a big deal, since it had been considering hooking up with China’s Alibaba Group in a possible bid for all or part of Yahoo.

In addition, it has had success in a smaller but similar scenario around Internet telephony giant Skype, which it eventually sold to Microsoft for a lucrative upside.

As with Skype, Silver Lake is still working with Andreessen Horowitz, as I had previously reported. In fact, principal Marc Andreessen was present in a recent informational meeting Silver Lake had with Yahoo’s Yang.

I asked Silver Lake for comment about the NDA, bur it, um, deflected my swooping inquiry (inside joke alert!).

It’s got some serious obstacles.

BuyWithMe is competing with both Groupon and LivingSocial, which have voracious appetites for cash — and frankly, have the market share to come closer to justifying it.

Groupon is close to completing a $540 million IPO and LivingSocial is assumed to be considering raising another private round instead of tapping the public markets.

Reports by DailyDealMedia and BetaBeat pegged BuyWithMe’s layoffs at between 50 and 75 percent of the company’s staff. A year ago, it had 90-plus employees, but its ranks have likely swelled as it made several acquisitions and attempted to expand nationally.

In an official statement last week, CEO Jim Crowley said: “BuyWithMe did have a significant reduction in staffing … We did this so the company is in the best position to continue to serve its merchants and members. As an organization we’re continuing to pursue our business and to support our customers throughout the country.”

In all, the company had raised at least $21 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Matrix Partners at one time.

A year ago, when the company’s CEO Cheryl Rosner, formerly of TicketsNow and Expedia, left after only eight months on the job, its plan was to add more markets, hire more employees and raise more cash.

Since then, it’s done all but one of those three things, meaning its burn rate and expenses increased without additional investments.

In the past six months alone, it purchased six companies, many of them smaller players, as well as some technology, too.

However, as it turns out, investors haven’t been impressed by the company’s artificial growth rates.

A source close to the situation said BuyWithMe hasn’t been able to raise more money, and “they need a lot.” Meanwhile, the insiders don’t want to cough up what’s needed. “They spent as though money was no object to try to compete,” the source said.

It’s not that capital has dried up for all companies competing in the broader daily deals space. In fact, some might consider it downright frothy. Beyond Groupon and LivingSocial, San Francisco-based Bloomspot raised $40 million in capital in August and Group Commerce, a white label provider, raised $10 million in a follow-on round in May. In the broader space, there’s been a coupon craze, with several providers raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few months alone.

But without many points of differentiation, BuyWithMe’s prospects are shrinking.

The company has often been considered the third-largest player in the space behind Groupon and LivingSocial, but now others are elbowing in, such as Travelzoo, Google and Amazon.

BuyWithMe’s best chances are to find a buyer.

It has a sizable — and valuable — email list, some technology assets and a recently rolled-out loyalty program. And, there are definitely still companies looking to enter the space.

A study by the 451 Group’s M&A KnowledgeBase found that as of August, mergers and acquisitions in the daily deal and coupon space were up 700 percent year over year to 35 from only five in the same period in 2010. Since then, dozens of others have been made.

The buyers aren’t always what you expect them to be, either. While some providers, like BuyWithMe and CrowdSavings, are adding markets through the acquisitions of one-off daily deals sites, other buyers are large marketing firms. For instance, Stamford, Conn.-based Affinion Group, a marketing and customer-engagement agency, paid $30 million for Eversave in July. ReachLocal, a search-engine marketing company for small and medium-size businesses, purchased DealOn Media for $10 million.

In our last episode, James and his employees threw a party — actually kind of a funeral (it’s complicated) — for the name of the Utah-based company he had bought: Corda Technologies. The point was to make way for the new name: Domo Technologies.

And he couldn’t just rename it and put out a press release like everyone else. He had to have fun with that, too. So he drew up a complicated mathematical formula, that would lead people good at math to the clues they would need to figure out the new name. The first person who guessed it right would get $10,000. (Someone in Utah, an engineer, ultimately won the prize money.)

But it wasn’t all fun and games. There was the uncomfortable matter of a continuing lawsuit with Adobe, which acquired James’ first company, Omniture, in 2009. Adobe claimed that James violated noncompete agreements by buying Corda and trying to hire away a former Adobe employee. Adobe sued James in Utah, while James sued Adobe alleging unfair competition in California. That part’s complicated, too.

And as we reported in April, after bolting Adobe, James started raising money and found investors willing to line up, checkbooks in hand, based almost entirely on his reputation. Today he confirmed our reporting by announcing that Benchmark Capital, whose notable investments include Twitter, eBay and MySQL, has invested $33 million in a Series A round of funding. Matt Cohler — General Partner of Benchmark; also the fifth employee at Facebook and a founder at LinkedIn — led the deal and is joining Domo’s board of directors.

Also joining Domo’s board:

• Mark Gorenberg, Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and former board member of Omniture
• John Thompson, Chairman and former CEO of Symantec and current CEO of Virtual Instruments
• Fraser Bullock, co-founder and Managing Director at Sorenson Capital, former Omniture director and one of the founding partners of Bain Capital
• Neal Williams, founder of Corda, the company James bought and is transforming into Domo

The funding comes on top of a $10 million seed round from several angel investors, including Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and several others.

What’s the name about? Domo will be a cloud-based software-as-service play, James says. And cloud-based companies are different from traditional enterprise software companies in one key way. “With traditional enterprise software, it’s all about selling a license and then signing up the customer for maintenance fee, and you live on that,” he told me. “With software-as-a-service, it’s all about making the customer happy. You’re doing everything you can to make their user experience a good one — one that’s so good that at the end of the day they say ‘thank you.’” As in “domo arigato,” which is Japanese for “thank you,” and which is also part of the title of a very strangely memorable song that was a hit for the band Styx in 1982. Get it?

The son of a U.S. Marine, James lived for a time in Japan. Plus, Domo is the sort of word — like Google — that can function as both noun and verb. And, like Google and Facebook, it has two Os.

So what will Domo do? Business intelligence, but it’s not what you think. “When you think about BI, it’s a big industry worth $10 billion a year, and all those companies have done all the work to collect all the data. But the customer is not getting any real value from that data,” James told me. “They feel like they’re spending a lot of money putting data in a box but not getting anything useful out of it.” He plans to fix that.

All the major vendors that collect any kind of business data have APIs, or application programming interfaces. Taking advantage of those APIs, Domo will collect data from the major business applications to craft what James calls an executive management platform. “It sits on top of all your systems and all your corporate data and allows you access to it in a way you never had,” he says.

The average day of a modern executive is full of reports brimming over with data. “Every week and month you get dozens of different reports in PowerPoint and PDF and email and Excel from all sorts of different people, and you have access to a few dozen systems that you have user names and passwords for,” he says. “But if you want to use it, you have to remember where it came from and how to get to it, and who to call to find out more, because they’re usually static.”

It was a revelation running Omniture, which specializes in Web traffic data and analytics. James would hear back from online marketing companies about how useful the Ominiture data was to their business, and wished he could have the same kind of useful data for running his own. “I was getting all these reports from all these different parts of the business. It was overwhelming.”

And none of it was live. “All of the data has already been created. But there’s nothing that sits on top of them all, and gives you real-time access to all of it and lets you look at it the way you want to,” James says. So that’s what Domo is all about. Tune in next week!

Yes.

Bill Nguyen, the serial entrepreneur who most recently sold Lala to Apple for around $80 million, is today launching Color, a proximity-based social network with no privacy settings.

The effulgent Nguyen has already gotten Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank to buy into his next act, raising $41 million in seed and Series A rounds in the eight months since he left Apple last year.

Color launches today on iPhone and Android (BlackBerry and Windows Phone are said to be coming soon). It is primarily a photo-sharing app, though text and video are also supported.

Rather than friending or following each other, Color’s users simply post pictures. Then, other users open the app and see pictures that Color has determined are relevant to them.

Users see pictures posted recently and nearby to their current location, as well as pictures posted by other members they’ve expressed an interest in by looking at, liking or commenting on their content.

This concept seems fitting for events–say, a sports game or a wedding–where lots of people who don’t necessarily know each other are taking photos of the same thing.

Everything posted on Color is public, and Color owns the rights to all content on the service (though users can delete their own uploads.)

What’s different about Color is relationships are implicit rather than explicit. This tweak may well resonate with people who feel their Facebook and Twitter friend lists are random, outdated and overwhelming.

Color hired away LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil to lead a team that dynamically determines what pictures and users are relevant.

So, for instance, to augment a location signal from GPS, Color will use clues like lighting and ambient noise to understand that two photos were taken in the same place. It will also try to understand which people users are interested in, and how that changes over time–so if a user hasn’t interacted with someone’s pictures for the while, that person’s icon will appear further out and darker in the user’s list of relevant people (Color calls this the “elastic network”).

Color hopes that the public nature of its service combined with the personal nature of a single user’s smartphone photos will ensure that people keep it decent. Its business model is to be location-based advertising.

Color also counts Peter Pham, formerly of BillShrink and Photobucket, as co-founder and president. (There are seven total with the co-founder title.) Pham and Nguyen showed off the product and described the company vision and business model in a video interview at the company’s expansive downtown Palo Alto offices earlier this week, which seem mostly empty despite Color’s team of 30 employees.

The real test, of course, will be not how many employees it can hire and how much money it can raise, but how many people actually find the product useful.

Will people see the value in contributing their experiences to Color’s massive repository? Will they understand how the app works, with its ample use of coinages like “bulletins” (proximity-based view), “visual diary” (chronological diary view) and “multilens” (albums of multiple people’s photos of the same thing)? We’ll have to see.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/with-41m-in-hand-color-deploys-new-proximity-based-social-network/feed/ 14 http://allthingsd.com/20100519/blip-tv-raises-10-million-for-more-web-video-you-probably-wont-see-on-hulu/ http://allthingsd.com/20100519/blip-tv-raises-10-million-for-more-web-video-you-probably-wont-see-on-hulu/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 12:00:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19657 YouTube isn’t the only Web video company celebrating its fifth anniversary. Blip.TV doesn’t have a celebratory channel, but it is marking the occasion in style: The New York-based company has raised $10 million in a C round led by Canaan Partners and Bain Capital.

Blip doesn’t make Web video–almost none of the Web video companies that survived the last bubble do that. Instead, Blip helps distribute clips, generally made by small-time producers, and sells ads against them. It splits the proceeds with the producers.

And like many other Web video outfits, Blip still isn’t profitable, though I’m told that could change by the end of the year. But Blip has a modest burn rate and has been steadily ramping up its list of big brand advertisers. Which is why it has been able to get away with raising only $8 million prior to its newest round.

Here’s an interview I shot with CEO Mike Hudack yesterday, in which he explains how a Web video company can survive without the backing of Google (GOOG) or big media companies. And he sketches out his vision for Web video’s future: Lots of people spending very little to make interesting stuff, and making enough money to keep on doing it.

Following that, a clip of Nostalgia Critic, one of Blip’s most successful shows. I don’t get it, but plenty of people do.

BLIP.TV RAISES $10.1 MILLION IN FUNDING

Online Media Company Secures Capital from Canaan Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

NEW YORK, NY – May 19, 2010 — Next generation television network blip.tv today announced the closing of its third round of institutional capital, led by Canaan Partners and existing investors Bain Capital Ventures. The company will use its new funding to accelerate the growth of the independent Web shows that blip.tv hosts and distributes, expand its content services team, continue to grow its international advertising sales force and develop new products for viewers and producers.

“Blip.tv turns five this year, and I couldn’t be happier with our success to date and our growth plans for the future,” said blip.tv CEO and co-founder Mike Hudack. “We started in 2005 with a simple mission: to change the entertainment industry by making independent show production sustainable and scalable. We’re moving on to the next phase of executing against that mission, and with help from both Canaan Partners and Bain Capital Ventures I’m confident that we’ll be successful. We’re making more shows sustainable every single day, and now we’re going to accelerate that change even faster. This is an extremely exciting time.”

More than 44,000 independent show producers visit the blip.tv show creator dashboard every day to review statistics, engage with their communities of viewers, manage their shows, and release new episodes across blip.tv’s extensive distribution network. Together these shows attract more than 90 million video views a month. Eighty-five percent of those views are paired with targeted, direct-sold advertising from brands such as PepsiCo, Chevrolet, Samsung, Starbucks, AT&T and Scion.

“We’ve been following blip.tv’s growth for years, and we’re excited to invest in the company as it continues to change the entertainment industry,” said Warren Lee, Venture Partner at Canaan Partners. “Blip.tv has executed on its vision, and the company is creating a new Web television industry that is drawing top talent from traditional television networks, the film industry and garages across America. We look forward to working with Mike and his team to continue transforming entertainment together.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100519/blip-tv-raises-10-million-for-more-web-video-you-probably-wont-see-on-hulu/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090707/new-york-times-to-boston-globe-bidders-take-your-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20090707/new-york-times-to-boston-globe-bidders-take-your-time/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:46:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9002 Stressed about making tomorrow morning’s deadline to submit a bid for the Boston Globe? No worries! The New York Times (NYT), which is selling the paper it bought in 1993, is telling prospective buyers to take their time.

Goldman Sachs (GS), which is running the auction for the Times, had originally told bidders to submit their offers by July 8. But as of last night, that deadline has been pushed back, with no new deadline to replace it, reports…the Boston Globe.

The Globe doesn’t know what the extension means, but it does have a concise roundup of potential bidders:

Three local businessmen have surfaced as potential Globe bidders: Stephen Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and managing director at the Bain Capital private equity firm; Jack Connors, a former advertising executive and chairman of Partners HealthCare; and Stephen Taylor, a former Globe executive and member of the family that sold the newspaper to the Times Co. for $1.1 billion in 1993. Connors and Pagliuca, who initially were considering separate bids, requested and were given permission by Goldman Sachs to join forces and submit a common bid.

The other big question. How much will the winner end up paying for the paper? A lot less than what the Times paid for it 16 years ago, obviously.

The Times has already told bidders that they should expect to assume $59 million in pension liabilities if they walk away with the paper, but beyond that, it’s anyone guess. The paper’s own David Carr went through this exercise last month and elicited guesstimates that ranged from $1 to $250 million.

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