The move is meant to regain the trust of Bloomberg’s terminal clients, like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. They’re understandably perturbed by revelations that reporters at Bloomberg News used a function that tracks how recently a client has logged in as a way of generating story leads about personnel changes.

Palmisano, Bloomberg said in a statement, will “immediately undertake a review of the company’s current practices and policies for client data and end user information, including a review of access issues recently raised by the company’s clients.” He’ll report directly to the company’s board of directors. Helping him will be the Hogan Lovells law firm and the Promontory Financial Group.

One wonders if part of the job will be to conduct a full audit of how many reporters used the controversial “Z function” to view client activity, how often it was used and what the result was, specifically if its use led to stories that were published. As I wrote earlier this week, that data probably exists, because Bloomberg has always been a big data company with a knack for keeping track of what its reporters do. And if there is an audit, will its results be publicly disclosed?

The function in question showed two bits of data that have made Bloomberg clients — essentially the who’s who of Wall Street and the financial industry in general — a little queasy. First, it reveals the last time a person logged in to his or her terminal. Reporters would sometimes use that to start asking questions about whether or not someone had left a given firm, and, if they had, write a story about it.

The other thing it was said to show is how often a client used a given function, though not in such granular detail that you could see what stocks or bonds were being researched. But again, it’s the sort of thing that might lead to questions that wouldn’t otherwise be asked, and eventually to stories that wouldn’t otherwise have been written.

Bloomberg also named its editor at large, Clark Hoyt, a former public editor at the New York Times, to review the relationship between Bloomberg’s commercial operations and its news operations.

(Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should remind you that for about a year during 2009-2010, I was an employee of Bloomberg News after the company bought BusinessWeek magazine from the McGraw-Hill Companies and relaunched it as Bloomberg Businessweek.)

The bigger of today’s two is Tableau Software, which specializes in data visualization. Yesterday, the company announced that the shares priced at $31, raising north of $254 million in the process.

The company will be listing on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol DATA. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the deal. Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, BMO Capital Markets and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Tableau’s biggest shareholder is the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, which led two investment rounds for a combined $15 million, the last being a $10 million series B in 2008 in a deal led by Forest Baskett. NEA’s stake amounted to about 37 percent before the sale, worth more than $607 million at the share offering price.

Founder and chief scientist Pat Hanrahan has about 18 percent of the company, worth about $295 million at the offering price. His co-founders — Christian Chabot, chairman and CEO, and Christopher Stolte, chief development officer — have about 15 percent each, with both stakes worth north of $235 million. Meritech Capital Partners has a stake amounting to about 6.5 percent, worth more than $102 million at the offering price.

The other one going today is Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company. Market price yesterday was at $13 a share, raising almost $79 million. It will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol MKTO.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are leading the offering. UBS, Canaccord Genuity, Raymond James and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Marketo’s biggest shareholder is InterWest Partners, which prior to the sale had a 33.3 percent stake worth more than $302 million. Storm Ventures has a stake of a little more than 17 percent, worth $66 million. Battery Ventures, which led a $50 million Series F in 2011, has a 7 percent stake, worth about $28 million.

In that capacity, I learned to use the Bloomberg terminal that sits on some 315,000 desks in the financial industry and that makes the company all its money. And I learned early on that practically every move terminal users make is tracked and recorded. (Also, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this website is owned by News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, which is a competitor to Bloomberg.)

In a Sunday editorial on Bloomberg View, the company’s equivalent of an Op/Ed page, Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler wrote, “Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable.” He opens the piece by quoting from a section of his book, “The Bloomberg Way”:

“The appearance of impropriety can be as damaging to a reputation as doing something improper. Because we hold others accountable for disclosure, we expect the same of ourselves. While disclosing errors of judgment may be embarrassing, the sooner the lapses are reported, the sooner there is nothing more to say.”

This raises the question: How fully will Bloomberg News disclose what it admits to be an “error of judgment” that is “almost as old as Bloomberg News.” How many reporters used the Z function — a software command that displays whether or not a customer is logged in and which functions he or she has been using the most — over the many years it was available to them? Chances are that Bloomberg has the data on precisely how often it was used and by which reporters. It could with some effort call in a third party to perform a detailed audit on this, and then disclose the findings of that audit to clients and the rest of the world.

I’ve asked Bloomberg about this. Spokeswoman Lauren Meller didn’t have an immediate answer. If I get one I’ll post it here.

If you’re going to properly understand the controversy that has emerged about the company in recent days, you need to understand the basics of the terminal itself. Bloomberg is at its very heart a financial data software company. In executing a “function” on its terminals, which are seen as status symbols of the financial industry, you type a command, usually one to four letters, and hit the Go key, which replaces the Return key on the conventional keyboard. When looking up, say, the price and fundamentals of Apple shares, you type AAPL, hit a key labeled Equity to indicate the first four letters are intended to indicate a stock ticker symbol, and then hit Go.

During the year I worked there I never heard about the so-called “Z function” at the heart of the current controversy, but its existence isn’t surprising. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what it’s all about. All 2,000-odd reporters at Bloomberg News have these terminals on their desks and use them to conduct research, report, write and publish their stories, and to communicate within the organization and without.

The Z function, now disabled for newsroom employees, showed when clients were and were not logged in to the system. When someone hadn’t logged in in a while, an attentive reporter might see that as a tip that the person was changing jobs or had left a firm, and then the reporter would start asking questions. Stories about executives moving between firms tend to be popular among terminal clients. It also showed what other Bloomberg functions these clients had been using, but in a non-specific way that wouldn’t show what stock or bond or other matter they might be researching or which news stories they had been reading. Bloomberg reporters are also said to have had access to transcripts of customer service calls clients made seeking help with functions.

Bloomberg is and has always been a “big data” company. The newly fashionable idea that you can learn a great deal and thus improve a software application by analyzing the big mass of data gathered about how it is used and where users run into problems has been been at the core of Bloomberg’s operational philosophy from the beginning.

Employees know from the moment they join the company that the amount of time they spend at their desks is logged. Building security systems are linked to the terminal and an access badge. When you “badge in” at any Bloomberg office around the world, this occurrence is logged. If you’re a Bloomberg employee based in New York and happen to be visiting London or Tokyo, your arrival and departure times are tracked, as is the amount of time your terminal is idle, should you be out gathering news or taking a lunch break.

I never experienced this first hand, but I heard privately shared tales from colleagues about their annual performance reviews, and discussions would at times turn to how well they used the terminal to do their jobs. As I was first joining, a friend who had worked at Bloomberg for a while told me that during one such conversation, he was mildly scolded for using Yahoo Finance to look up some bit of financial data — terminals also have Web browsers — rather than the terminal itself.

I point out this conversation for a reason. In its quest to make its products better — certainly a logical goal — Bloomberg clearly tracks how often its clients use its many functions. If that’s true, then it logically follows that it tracks how its reporters do the same thing. Historical data on the use by reporters of the Z function exists and can be examined.

As an organization, Bloomberg News is journalism as re-imagined by Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the philosophical father of factory automation. Its reporters are routinely gauged on how often they log scoops that appear on the terminal’s news service. Taylor believed that by analyzing work, the “One Best Way” to get it done could be found. As the founding editor of Bloomberg News, Winkler always struck me as an avid student of “Taylorism.” Every bit of data that can be gathered is analyzed to make the news gathering process better and more efficient. Indeed, Winkler’s 360-page book seems almost Taylor-inspired.

Scoops and other distinctive stories are further categorized into a taxonomy using an internal nomenclature, and the best of those are singled out in what’s known as “Matt’s Note,” a weekly memo from Winkler. An MMWin, or a market-moving win, is a story that beats a similar story by a competitor by several minutes and that after publication causes the market to react in some way. A Follow is when a competitor writes a story that follows up on a Bloomberg scoop. And there are many others.

All of these are thought to be tracked and used to evaluate a reporter’s performance every year. That means there’s data on how many reporters used the Z function and about whom, and probably data as well correlating to the published stories that resulted.

With at least two large banks complaining, and now two government entities — the Federal Reserve in the U.S. and the European Central Bank — asking questions about all this, you can expect concerns about the lines between Bloomberg’s business and news operations to persist.

That’s what Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff told employees in a companywide email following a complaint from Goldman Sachs that accused Bloomberg News journalists of using private subscriber information pulled from company data terminals to break news.

According to reports, Bloomberg journalists routinely gathered information from the company’s financial data terminals, which are widely used on Wall Street. While reporters weren’t able to see market-sensitive details like securities-level or trading data, they were able to see customer contact, login and usage data, and chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives.

Far from hard-core “big data,” but easily enough to gather insight into a trader’s interests and thinking. Indeed, sources at J. P. Morgan tell the Financial Times that the firm believes that Bloomberg reporters used login information to determine whether Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale,” had left the bank. Other sources tell CNBC that a former Bloomberg employee used the company’s data terminals to view usage information on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Sources say that a preliminary investigation into the incident by Bloomberg found that hundreds of reporters had misused the company’s terminals by trolling for scoops.

Just ask yourself this: How much would a hedge fund pay for the information Bloomberg journalists had?

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) May 11, 2013

Bloomberg has since restricted its newsroom staff’s access to customer data, following the complaint from Goldman. It has also created a new client-data compliance officer to oversee customer data-security issues. Meanwhile, both the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department are said to be scrutinizing the incidents.

Dow Jones & Co., publisher of AllThingsD and The Wall Street Journal, competes with Bloomberg in financial news and information.

Doctoroff’s note in full, below:

Since our founding more than 30 years ago, the proper safeguarding of customer data has been a central tenet of Bloomberg’s culture.

A Bloomberg client recently raised a concern that Bloomberg News reporters had access to limited customer relationship management data through their use of the Bloomberg terminal. Although we have long made limited customer relationship data available to our journalists, we realize this was a mistake.

Having recognized this mistake, we took immediate action. Last month we changed our policy so that all reporters only have access to the same customer relationship data available to our clients. Additionally, we decided to further centralize our data security efforts by appointing Steve Ross, one of our most senior executives, to the new position of Client Data Compliance Officer. Steve is responsible for reviewing and, if necessary, enhancing protocols which among other things will continue to ensure that our news operations never have access to confidential customer data.

To be clear, the limited customer relationship data previously available to our reporters never included access to our trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems or our clients’ messages. Moreover, reporters could not see news stories that clients read, or the securities they viewed. Bloomberg has very strict data security policies in place, in addition to significant and rigorous training, processes and protocols. Upon hiring, all Bloomberg employees enter into confidentiality provisions, including Bloomberg News.

Client trust is our highest priority and the cornerstone of our business, and we are deeply committed to ensuring the complete integrity and confidentiality of our clients’ data in all situations and at all times.

Dan

Viddy will return $18 million of the $30 million raised in its series B round one year ago, leaving the company with $11 million in the bank. Lead investors in the most recent round were NEA, Khosla Ventures and Goldman Sachs, all of which will receive much of their money back.

“Viddy raised a substantial amount of capital last year, during different market conditions,” said JJ Aguhob, Viddy president, in a statement to AllThingsD. “A year later, Viddy is a leaner, product-focused organization that is steadily growing its audience and will soon be releasing new products. Our late-stage investors have been very supportive, but it just makes good business sense to return capital we do not need and have a clean balance sheet in the process.”

The market conditions Aguhob speaks of, I’d estimate, involve Facebook’s proclivity to giveth and taketh away. Viddy, along with other social video startups like Socialcam, rose to prominence last summer on the back of Facebook, when the social giant was delivering massive amounts of traffic to social video apps. Alas, after wide reports of Socialcam spamming users and general distaste for its viral reach, Facebook turned off the traffic funnel to social video apps, leaving companies like Viddy and Socialcam in the lurch.

So essentially, Viddy raised tons of money when traffic was rich and scaling, hiring and expanding resources rapidly made sense. Now, in its post-Facebook-aided future, Viddy is downsizing — both in bank balance and in team size. (The company laid off a third of its staff in February.)

As a result of the recapitalization, NEA partner Peter Sonsini will leave Viddy’s board of directors. “We remain shareholders and strong supporters of the company,” Sonsini said in a statement. “We came to an agreement that works for all parties, resulting in Viddy being a well-funded early stage company with a balance sheet that reflects its size and needs.”

Jason Rapp, managing director at L.A.-based Science Inc., will join Viddy’s board as chairman in the wake of Sonsini’s departure. Brian O’Malley of Battery Ventures and entrepreneur Sky Dayton remain on the board.

Including the recent departure of biz dev chief Chris Ovitz, Viddy’s remaining headcount is at about 16, down from around 30.

The company announced today that Prashant Gandhi, a senior director at Cisco who led development of its own SDN efforts, will join Big Switch as vice president of product management, starting today.

It’s an important hire for Big Switch because there are few people who have as much history in the world of traditional enterprise networking who also have as much history working on efforts to remake it with software. Gandhi worked on some of Cisco’s most important mainstream switching products, like the Cisco Nexus 7000. But he also worked on Cisco’s Nexus 1000v virtual switch and its Cisco One software controller.

His move is occurring at a crucial moment. In recent weeks Cisco has been talking a lot about its interest in contributing to the OpenDaylight project, an open-source SDN consortium. Cisco has contributed code from the CiscoOne product to the project, and Gandhi would have been intimately familiar with the substance of its effort. BigSwitch is a member of OpenDaylight, too.

Big Switch, on the other hand, hails directly out of OpenFlow, another open-source networking project that was born at Stanford University.

I talked with Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s marketing VP, who described Gandhi’s move as a big vote in favor of Big Switch’s approach over Cisco’s. “No one is better qualified to make a judgement on Cisco’s contribution to OpenDaylight versus ours. He has worked on Cisco’s contribution and he is voting with his feet to come to Big Switch.”

Big Switch, you’ll recall, came out of stealth mode last year, backed by $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs. Its plan is basically to turn networks into a software platform around which companies can build their own applications.

And yes, SDN technology is still new, and most of the battles now are about building foundations for future business that lie years down the road. Indeed, companies like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper still sell a great deal of old-school non-SDN networking gear, though HP in particular has been going to a lot of trouble to call attention to its shift in favor of SDN-ready gear.

Gandhi is a Cisco veteran, having joined that company first in 1999 in a technical marketing role that lasted six years. He then went on to start Rohati Networks, which Cisco snapped up during an acquisition spurt in 2009.

Big Switch didn’t make Gandhi available for an interview, but in a statement announcing his hiring, he alluded to Rohati and called Big Switch a “unique opportunity:”

“Since the successful completion of the integration of Rohati technologies within Cisco’s Data Center Group, I have been searching for a unique opportunity in the rapidly forming software-defined networking market. … Big Switch Networks is the leader in SDN with the best team, the best technology and the best customer traction, so the choice was clear. Customers are very eager to bring commercial-grade SDN solutions into their networks, and I look forward to helping this market move quickly to maturity.”

On Deck announced this morning that Google Ventures has led an additional $17 million investment with participation from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. Other investors in the round include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.

That round comes on top of a $100 million round of debt financing raised last year from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., and a $15 million Series C led by SAP Ventures in 2011.

So far, On Deck has funded more than $450 million in loans to small businesses. Its borrowers, CEO Noah Breslow told me yesterday, tend to be small: Restaurants, auto body shops, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, construction contractors. Most of them have 200 employees or less. “Our customers tend to be businesses that do a large number of small-ticket transactions,” he said.

Launched in 2006, On Deck has turned out to be sort of a right-time, right-place story. Commercial banks were being tightfisted with loans, even to healthy businesses. But they also tend to be challenged by the time and effort that goes into underwriting a smallish loan that the borrower only needs for a short period of time.

Where banks tend to focus more on the personal credit rating, the On Deck software gathers live digital data from a business’s operations in order to help evaluate the business’s health. The point is to use that data that banks and other potential investors usually don’t see, as a tool to realistically evaluate the risk of making a loan that goes beyond the simple credit rating of the business owner. On Deck then takes it a step further and actually makes the loan.

Breslow said loan volume is up 100 percent over last year, and is on track to grow again by 140 percent this year. By the end of the year, it will have loaned more than $1 billion to small businesses.

As the business grows, On Deck has gathered a lot of data on its applicants. And as so many companies are starting to realize, that aggregated data is yielding some interesting insights. Stay tuned for more on that later this year.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG sold the debt for Apple to investors in all corners of the credit markets, from buyers overseas to municipal-bond investors to portfolio managers who typically prefer ultrasafe government debt. Pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds also joined in the scramble.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Or at least they say they have. Check out the results of a recent survey of U.S. Web users, conducted by Goldman Sachs. And notice the Netflix bump across all ages — but particularly with teens and twentysomethings:

Goldman doesn’t attempt to explain why people like Netflix so much more now than they did a year ago (the survey was conducted in mid-January, before the deluge of press for “House of Cards,” so it’s unlikely that Kevin Spacey is the cause). But the numbers do give some credence to Reed Hastings’s contention that old and new customers are beginning to forgive the service for its multiple mistakes in 2011. Then again, the blowout numbers in Netflix’s last earnings report suggested the same thing.

It’s crucial to note that this is a self-reported survey, so users’ actual behavior may be quite different from what they’ll admit to Goldman or themselves.

For instance, I’m sure that YouTube occupies a lot more viewing time than people suspect, or are willing to admit. Similarly, the Goldman report suggests that YouTube and Hulu are in the same league when it comes to viewing time, and that’s certainly not the case.

That said, I would love to know why people are reporting significant drops in iTunes engagement — particularly since iTunes has always had a fairly modest video component.

The Times said it is selling the paper, along with the rest of its New England Media Group, because “a sale is in the best long-term interests of these properties and the employees who work for them as well as in the best interests of our shareholders.”

Bloomberg first reported the sales talks.

The Times bought the Boston paper for $1.1 billion in 1993, and hired Goldman Sachs to explore selling it in 2009.

Dumping the Globe is consistent with the Times’ larger strategy of selling off everything but its flagship paper. Last year, for instance, it sold About.com for $300 million to Barry Diller’s IAC.

Last year the New England Media Group, which also includes the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, generated revenue of about $400 million. That was down approximately 2.5 percent from the previous year, and accounted for nearly 20 percent of the Times’ total revenue.

On Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer called the company’s mobile efforts a “nascent source of revenue,” a theme she reiterated in her appearance earlier this week at a Goldman Sachs investment conference in San Francisco.

There, she said that the company was going to cut down on its apps portfolio from more than 60 to “the dozen or so applications that people use all the time on their phone” to turbocharge efforts in the key arena.

Touting her mobile aspirations, as well as noting Yahoo’s clear weakness in the area, has been a carefully concerted Mayer effort to get in front of investors’ worries about the company’s mobile performance.

In fact, Mayer addressed the issue in an interview with Bloomberg recently, noting rhetorically: “Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser or a social network, how are we going to compete?”

How, indeed.

Because, according to sources inside the company, direct mobile revenue hovers only around $125 million annually, mostly from search revenue on mobile devices. While users are consuming lots of Yahoo Web pages on their phones, which could technically boost the sales numbers higher, rendering most desktop-created ads on mobile is not the same thing as the significant mobile revenue Yahoo needs to generate.

There’s no question that Mayer has taken every public opportunity she can to talk about how important mobile is to Yahoo’s future and how she is going to double down in the area. Along with loudly proclaiming her commitment to the fast-growing sector, she has also bought a number of small mobile startups since she arrived at the Silicon Valley Internet giant last year.

Last week that meant Yahoo scooped up Alike, a mobile app that helps users discover nearby venues and places to visit based on your interests.

But, while these acquisitions are all interesting and important to spur innovation and consumer engagement, they are still very tiny steps to solving the big problem for Yahoo to make mobile a truly significant revenue stream without any of the most critical elements of the ecosystem that rivals have.

It’s not that Yahoo has not tried in the past, having mounted several aggressive and quite elaborate mobile efforts over the years. But, without going into painful detail, most have had little traction overall and no needle-moving revenue to speak of.

The constant shifting of mobile-focused execs has been another difficulty, with little continuing leadership since Marco Boerries left in 2009. To fix that, Mayer appointed Adam Cahan as Yahoo’s mobile product kingpin in November. The former IntoNow founder and CEO oversees all mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

But mobile monetization is another issue, without a significant mobile advertising czar in charge — a task which then presumably falls to new COO Henrique De Castro. But while the Google exec is an experienced enough online ad exec, he was definitely not known at the search giant for any serious mobile expertise.

Yahoo will need that and fast, because however you count mobile revenue at the company, insiders there admit it is extraordinarily low. That’s probably why Mayer declined to share specific mobile revenue figures in Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, instead touting 200 million daily active mobile users.

Impressive? Not exactly. By comparison, Facebook said it had 618 million daily active mobile users with 23 percent of its $1.33 billion in Q4 revenue from mobile, from an almost zero base a year ago.

That’s 10 times more than Yahoo — about $300 million a quarter versus $30 million.

Interestingly, at the Goldman conference, Mayer made the point that no one has cracked the mobile monetization puzzle. True enough, but both Facebook and, of course, Google are well down the road to doing so, while Yahoo remains stalled as yet.

To be fair, the acceleration of mobile monetization at Facebook is perhaps easier for the social networking giant, which has been achieving that by leveraging its singular product and audience and building its own mobile ad technology.

And Google has already been hard at work retrofitting its massive search business to aim at mobile, has strengthened its efforts with the purchase of AdMob and Motorola and, of course, has made the early and enormous investment in its Android platform.

From a stand start, it’s all a much harder task for Yahoo, which has a plethora of product offerings that all require different mobile monetization solutions. It’s a bigger problem since Yahoo’s own mobile ad targeting and contextual search is considered weak and unable to serve better targeted ads in a variety of mobile experiences. That means things as simple as when you search for a sports game, you get a beer ad.

In improving this, Yahoo has few choices — building it up in-house, acquiring a company with mobile ad expertise or partnering with someone in a significant manner, which most suggest is its best alternative in the short term.

The first is certainly important, which is why Mayer is pursuing the range of mobile startups she has, seeking both apps consumers will love and engineering expertise in the area. That is all well and good, but focus has to be on creating great products first and, as Mayer has said repeatedly, money should follow.

The second has also been considered, with Yahoo looking at a range of possible acquisitions to improve its mobile ad technology. In this, because of Yahoo’s huge scale, there are still few choices, boiling down to the larger players, JumpTap and Millennial.

Yahoo has mulled over acquiring both over the years and even recently, although the price tags are high and there are issues about whether this will solve the problem or not.

One possible short-term alternative is to do some kind of mobile advertising or contextual search deal with Google and perhaps one with Apple, which has its own iAd offering.

According to sources, Yahoo’s current search partnership does not preclude the company from working with Google in certain mobile monetization areas. In fact, the pair recently struck a deal, as Peter Kafka wrote, “to begin running some of its AdSense display ads on Yahoo sites, and will become one of several ad networks Yahoo uses to fill some of its pages.”

That’s money in the bank for Yahoo, which Mayer — an ex-Googler, too — knows might extend well to mobile monetization and innovation. She has famously handed out free smartphones to all employees, which is a nice touch and also an important message to send to them and others.

But it will take a lot more than an iPhone in every cubicle at Yahoo, because mobile is the issue she will be scrutinized for, given the stress she has put on it as one of the key ways to revive Yahoo.

“There is no question Marissa will be judged on bringing the product management expertise she demonstrated at Google to Yahoo to make things consumers want to use in mobile,” one top Yahoo insider told me. “The thing is, she has to also actually make some real money doing it.”

Institutional Venture Partners led the round, with existing investors RRE Ventures, SAP Ventures and First Round Capital also participating.

To date, the New York-based company has raised $75 million in equity, and even more if you count the $100 million in debt it secured from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit in August.

On Deck said it will use the capital raised today to fund additional growth, which includes new product development and getting the word out to more merchants about the company.

On Deck lends between $5,000 and $150,000 in short-term loans to small businesses, ranging from auto repair shops to bridal boutiques. It vows that the loan application process can take as little as 15 minutes because it uses technology on the back end to evaluate a company beyond its credit scores.

Other lenders provide loans online, but most are targeting other online entities. For instance, some of the companies that have entered that space include Kabbage, which has raised $56 million in capital, and more recently, Amazon.com.

Since 2008, On Deck says, it has deployed $400 million to thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses.

“Ultimately, you don’t want to trouble users by making them download too many apps,” she said. “But many apps are single-use.”

The hope, she said, is that each Yahoo user will have on their smartphones “the two to four apps that matter most to them.”

One mobile opportunity she also sees is around Yahoo Groups. As communications within groups of people move to the phone and other mobile devices, Mayer said, there are “all kinds of possibilities” for Yahoo.

AllThingsD.com

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco, Cook said Apple won’t make any effort to campaign for the proposal, the second one on Apple’s proxy, though he said he supports it personally, and will vote for it himself. “We’re not going to do a campaign mailing,” he said. “This is a waste of shareholder money, and it’s a distraction.”

Last week, hedge fund Greenlight Capital sued the company, saying the proposal would eliminate preferred stock from the corporate charter. Its CEO, David Einhorn, attacked Apple as having a “Depression-era mentality” about returning cash to shareholders.

Cook said the proposal doesn’t eliminate preferred stock entirely. The proposal, he said, would require that the issuance of any preferred stock would first have to be approved by common shareholders.

However, Cook took a friendlier view toward Einhorn’s preferred stock proposal in general. Echoing a statement Apple issued last week, Cook called Einhorn’s suggestion “creative.”

“We are going to thoroughly evaluate their current proposals,” he told analyst Bill Shope. “We welcome all ideas from all our shareholders, and we are going to thoroughly consider it.”

Einhorn argued last week that the issuance of a perpetual preferred stock would help Apple return more cash to investors than it has so far. Apple’s cash balance, at north of $130 billion as of the end of its most recent quarter, has continued to generated a lot of attention as it has grown over the years.

We wish people involved in this lawsuit would take this money and donate it to a good cause. This is a waste of money for all involved. It’s a silly sideshow.

– Apple CEO Tim Cook slams Greenlight Capital’s lawsuit at today’s Goldman Sachs Technology Conference

Well-known Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs tech banker Scott Stanford are starting a new company that will focus on formulating a new model of how startups are created.

Pishevar confirmed his move, but Stanford did not respond to a query about the new effort.

That said, sources said he is poised to leave the investment bank and partner with Pishevar in a new venture called Sherpa, which has two parts.

One is called The Foundry, which is being funded by a number of major strategic corporations, who are presumably looking to gain a digital edge. It will also include well-known entrepreneur partners, but no investors or venture capital firms.

There will also be a fund related to invest in the new companies created, which will also include assets added in from the larger companies.

It’s not exactly an incubator or accelerator, said Pishevar in an interview, given the mixed record of those efforts to create startups. He would not give any more details as yet.

Pishevar will remain as a venture advisor to Menlo, as part of the change, and has also been named a strategic advisor to Uber, the fast-growing car service.

Said Pishevar: “I’m incredibly excited to announce my new endeavor, Sherpa and The Foundry. This is the biggest idea I’ve ever pursued. I’m also so excited about my new role as strategic advisor to Uber and very honored to stay as a venture advisor at Menlo to continue the epic work we have done together.”

The parting with Menlo appears to be amicable. “Menlo is excited to see Shervin’s new model come to fruition while continuing to work together in his role as a venture advisor,” said Menlo’s Shawn Carolan. “As anyone who knows him can attest, his talents in spotting great ideas, connecting and evangelizing are exceptional and his venture advisor role allows us to continue to collaborate on finding and creating value together.”

Indeed more than many in the tech scene, the incessantly networking Pishevar is perhaps well suited to such an ambitious effort like Sherpa. He’s has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0′s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo’s investment in Tumblr.

An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with Mindjolt.

And Stanford is equally well known in Silicon Valley, having shepherded a wide variety of high-profile deals for the banking giant, while heading its global Internet investment banking business from San Francisco as a managing director.

He’s been at Goldman for a dozen years and has been involved in investments in Facebook, Zappos and LinkedIn. Before banking, he worked at pioneering search company, LookSmart.

The venture arm of the world’s biggest chip company joins other investors — including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures — and brings the total amount of capital raised to $45 million.

Remember, software-defined networking (SDN) aims to do to networking gear what virtualization companies like VMware have done to servers. In the same way that one server can be virtualized into many, all with different configurations, the point of SDN is to make networks as easy to spin up, configure and expand as virtual servers in the cloud, all of it done via software. VMware, for its part, is in the game via its purchase last year of Nicira, the first SDN company I ever heard of.

The idea is considered a metaphysical threat to established networking companies, specifically Cisco Systems; analysts, specifically J.P. Morgan’s Rod Hall, have worried that Cisco isn’t ready to meet the threat.

I had a quick chat with Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster), and he said that Intel, which does make some specialized networking chips, sees some alignment of interest with Big Switch in the future of SDN.

As I noted before, Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its partners include Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

In a major exec departure, Square COO Keith Rabois will be leaving the San Francisco payments company.

Square gave no other information about the sudden management change, but sources said disagreements between Rabois and CEO and founder Jack Dorsey were part of the reason for his exit.

It’s not clear if there were more serious issues between them, or whether the parting was related to a specific business problem. But the departure of the No. 2 exec is significant, so definitely more to come on what happened.

In a statement about the move, Rabois only said:

It is amazing what Square has accomplished since August of 2010. When I joined, there were 17 engineers all reporting flatly to Jack. The local coffee shop served as our interview room. Leading our amazing crew has been the most rewarding professional journey of my life. I am forever grateful to Jack, for his confidence in me and to each and every member of the team for allowing me to learn from them.

But every day matters. And it is better at this point for me to be doing something different every day.

As a result, I’ve decided to resign from Square. I am very excited about what lies ahead for the company. Square could not be better poised for greatness.

I will have more to share about my next opportunity soon.

Said Square’s Dorsey:

Today I accepted Keith’s resignation from Square. When he joined, we had fewer than 30 employees and under 1000 active merchants. Today, over 3 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square, processing over $10 billion annually. We couldn’t have done it without him and we wish him well in his next opportunity.

Square CFO Sarah Friar will become acting COO, Square said. It’s an unusual move to put an exec without a lot of deep operational experience in the second-most-important slot at Square, though the former Goldman Sachs analyst and Salesforce.com finance exec is clearly familiar with the heart of the company’s business.

The change in top management comes at a time of fast growth for the three-year-old Square, which completed a $200 million funding round in the fall that valued the company at $3.2 billion. At the time, the company said it had more than 400 employees and would grow by 100 more by year’s end.

Square is best known for allowing a range of small businesses, such as taxicab drivers, to accept credit and debit cards using their mobile phones. But it has also branched out into other mobile payments areas.

Besides his stint at Square, Rabois is a well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, and serves on several boards, including Yelp’s. He has worked at many startups, too, including PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Slide (acquired by Google).

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based marketplace for personal projects and services, has hired longtime Google exec Stacy Brown-Philpot as COO.

As both its funding and also competition have increased, the move is another major effort by TaskRabbit to up its management game.

Brown-Philpot certainly fits the bill, having worked at a wide range of jobs at Google for more than a decade. The Detroit native was most recently an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures, and has worked on global operations for a wide range of products — including as head of online sales and operations for Google India — and also in high-level finance jobs at the Silicon Valley search giant.

Previous to Google, Brown-Philpot worked at the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm and also in M&A at Goldman Sachs. She attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and has an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In other words, a very impressive resume — more impressive, given that she has always been a straightforward and charming exec in my many encounters with her over the years.

Brown-Philpot will be the second time that TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque has tried to expand the company’s top talent base. In June of last year, Busque took back the title of CEO from Hotwire founder Eric Grosse, who had been hired in late 2011.

But in November of 2012, TaskRabbit bought One Jackson, adding Anne Raimondi (pictured above with Brown-Philpot and Busque) as chief revenue officer. And now Brown-Philpot.

The trio has their work cut out for them. Last July, the company garnered another $13 million in funding in a Series C round, led by Founders Fund and including existing investors such as Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Parters. The startup has raised $38 million in total over its five-year history.

Here’s the video of an interview about the expansion plans that I did late last week with Busque and Brown-Philpot at their SOMA offices in San Francisco:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/taskrabbit-hires-googles-brown-philpot-in-a-renewed-management-expansion-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130102/new-year-same-rating-j-p-morgan-still-bullish-on-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20130102/new-year-same-rating-j-p-morgan-still-bullish-on-facebook/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:40:33 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=281680 Facebook’s tough first six months on the Nasdaq soured some investors on the company’s moneymaking prospects. But a few analysts are still keeping the faith.

Case in point: The latest “buy” rating coming from J.P. Morgan Chase, complete with a shiny new price target raised to $35, up six bucks from the firm’s previous figure. That’s courtesy of Doug Anmuth, JPM’s Facebook analyst, who has been bullish on the social giant’s prospects since early on. In his latest research note, Anmuth echoes Facebook’s common refrain: Facebook’s ad prospects are still in the early days.

This comes as Facebook continues trying to convince investors that its mobile monetization strategy will eventually yield strong returns, given consumers’ massive shift to mobile devices in recent years. Facebook isn’t there yet, mind you, as the company still continues to see the lion’s share of its revenue come from desktop ads. But not for long, according to JPM: The firm expects Facebook’s mobile revenue to surpass that of desktop revenue by 2014.

For the time being, Anmuth is impressed with Facebook’s recent inroads. Facebook’s Exchange product makes good use of third-party data; that hopefully should result in better ads being shown to users, and better returns to advertisers overall. And he believes that Facebook’s most recent push into e-commerce with “Gifts” paid off significantly, bringing in a new revenue stream just in time for the holiday season.

Despite the bright outlook from J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — its three largest underwriters — Facebook’s stock hasn’t lived up to initial expectations. Share prices were cut in half during the first six months of trading, down from an opening price of $38 per share.

But Facebook has fared better on the market in recent days, hovering around the $26 to $28 range over the past two months. Shares closed at $26.62 on Monday, the last day of 2012 trading. The bulls expect that number to keep going up in the New Year.

Now Facebook needs to make its own New Year’s resolution: Proving those analysts right.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130102/new-year-same-rating-j-p-morgan-still-bullish-on-facebook/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:01:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=278386

For a long time in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, Brad Koenig was one of Silicon Valley’s top investment bankers, shepherding deals such as Yahoo’s IPO and a plethora of others.

That’s no surprise, given that he was the managing director and head of global technology investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Goldman, as well as Morgan Stanley, led many of the big-name, big-money transactions for the digerati.

But no matter how you slice it, Koenig’s job was on the sidelines as a facilitator rather than as a participant.

No longer. After retiring in 2005 from Goldman and doing a bunch of advising work, Koenig decided to jump into the fray, putting his money into a new start-up called FoodyDirect.

Simply put, the service ships food from iconic restaurants, bakeries and other specialty food outlets, adding in a variety of information about the products and also making it easier for those businesses to ship.

Some of the offers being coordinated include well-known — among foodies, at least — fare from places such as Anderson’s Frozen Custard in Buffalo, N.Y.; Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas; Sable’s Smoked Fish in New York City; and Hancock Gourmet Lobster in Cundy’s Harbor, Maine.

I tried both Anderson’s and Sable’s and they arrived on time and fresh — as well as delicious — which is presumably the selling point that FoodyDirect pitches to merchants.

While many of these restaurants do this on their own, Koenig is hoping that the systems FoodyDirect creates are easier and more efficient, from packaging to shipping.

Of course, FoodyDirect faces a lot of competition — from big online retailers like Amazon to smaller ones like Gilt Taste — as well as an uphill battle to acquire frequent customers.

But Koenig believes in the concept so much — which he is doing with his brother, who has been in the restaurant biz for 25 years — that he invested his own money in the initial effort.

Now, along with more money from him, a bunch of angel investors and venture interest, FoodyDirect is getting $3 million more to see if the concept pans out.

Here’s Koenig talking about his new life on the other side of the table:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121129/rim-shares-rally-on-upgrade-blackberry-10-qwerty-phone/ http://allthingsd.com/20121129/rim-shares-rally-on-upgrade-blackberry-10-qwerty-phone/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:11:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=273843 Today brought with it some good news for Research In Motion: an upgrade from Goldman Sachs. In a hesitantly positive note to clients, Goldman analyst Simona Jankowski raised her rating on the BlackBerry maker to “buy” from “neutral,” saying the company’s chances for recovery are improving.

“We expect RIM’s results will exceed Street estimates over the next four quarters,” Jankowski wrote in a note to clients. “We now assess a 30 percent chance of success for BB10 given positive early reviews, broad-based carrier support, attractive features and interest by carriers and consumers in broadening the field beyond Android/iOS.”

A “30 percent chance of success” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of RIM’s prospects. The company remains a long shot against formidable competition. But Jankowski’s tentative vote of confidence, along with news that RIM has released to developers a new BlackBerry 10 with Qwerty keyboard for testing, was enough to push the company’s stock into another rally. At $11.93, the RIM shares are trading up well over 7 percent as I write this.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121129/rim-shares-rally-on-upgrade-blackberry-10-qwerty-phone/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121114/news-corp-nears-deal-for-yes-stake/ http://allthingsd.com/20121114/news-corp-nears-deal-for-yes-stake/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2012 04:34:54 +0000 Matthew Futterman http://allthingsd.com/?p=269844 News Corp. is closing in on a deal to buy a minority stake in New York regional sports network YES, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations.

According to one of the people, a deal may be announced in the coming days that values the home network of the New York Yankees at roughly $3 billion. News Corp. is said have its sights on nearly 40% of the network, seeking to buy most, if not all, of the stakes owned by longtime investors Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Providence Equity Partners. Goldman helped launch YES in 2001. The Yankees and numerous investors in the team also own substantial stakes in the network.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121114/news-corp-nears-deal-for-yes-stake/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121114/new-funding-round-puts-spotify-valuation-at-3-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20121114/new-funding-round-puts-spotify-valuation-at-3-billion/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:38:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=269688 Spotify has closed its latest funding round, which values the company at around $3 billion, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Goldman Sachs would lead a group of investors putting $100 million into the streaming music company.

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