4 posts and columns on convertible

Liveblogging Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting (Afternoon Session): Hey, Steve Ballmer is All In!

in News on July 29, 2010 at 1:15 pm PT

BoomTown is in Redmond, Wash. today to attend Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeeting, where top execs from the software giant have been taking the stage to talk about All Things Microsoft. I liveblogged this morning’s sessions here, and now the afternoon confab, which opened with CEO Steve Ballmer, who seemed was confidently strutting around after delivering record results last week for the fourth quarter. But can we turn around its lackluster stock?

Viacom, Real Networks Spin Off Rhapsody Music Service

in Media on February 9, 2010 at 1:26 pm PT

Real Networks and Viacom are reorganizing Rhapsody, their joint-venture music service, and will be spinning it off into an independent company, they told the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s Napster, sell music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s a la carte download offering. But neither service has been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort. More shortly.

Palm: The Turnaround Story of the Year

in News on June 24, 2009 at 3:10 pm PT

A quick but noteworthy follow-up to my earlier post about the incredible gain in market cap Palm made in the last year. Palm’s valuation is actually higher than the $1.95 billion I quoted earlier. Quite a bit higher, it turns out.
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BoomTown Channels Miss Cleo: A Twitter Transaction? More Facebook Follies? And Will There Finally Be a Yahoo-Microsoft Deal?

in News on April 13, 2009 at 4:42 am PT

This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition :)” Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there). Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.
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