It’s official: MySpace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the streaming music service. It is paying a fire-sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earn-outs for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell. Investors like Sequoia and Warner Music Group had pumped at least $25 million into the venture.
You think you’re paying too much for cable TV? Check out this nugget, buried in satellite TV provider Dish Networks’ quarterly filing: The company has spent $328 million in its legal battle against Tivo this year, and that bill could keep growing.
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
Last week, Jeff Bezos made $2 billion in one day, courtesy of a massive spike in Amazon shares. That gives him more money to plow into the likes of Aviary, a Long Island-based company that makes design software. The Amazon CEO has made a second investment in the company as part of a $7 million round led by Spark Capital.
The publisher delivered a pleasant earnings surprise yesterday by cutting costs. Now it’s hoping for a revenue bump, if advertisers will play along.
Now that Twitter doesn’t have to worry about raising money ever again (right?), it can spend time tackling all sorts of projects, big and small. Here’s one of the small ones: The company has created a better way for users to flag spam accounts. The big stuff? Coming up.
Maybe this is why Comcast rushed to knock down a story that said it bought NBC Universal from GE: It knew Wall Street would hate the idea.
There 85,000 apps available. So how do you get Apple to highlight yours in national TV ads?
Good news (potentially) for T. Rowe Price and the other investors plowing $100 million into the revenue-free start-up: The service’s users absolutely love clicking on ads, says a new study.
Remember the good old days of the last Web boom, when start-ups sold to Google and Yahoo instead of going public? They’re back!
More from the post-Q&A Q&A: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says major investors like Gordon Crawford support her, and that she’s in the market for medium-sized M&A. Here’s what she had to say.
Start-ups whose business plans are based on selling advertising are having a very hard time raising money. But start-ups that want to make money by helping other people sell advertising? That’s another story.
Today’s example: Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles-based advertising-optimization start-up, has raised a $9 million C round led by Peacock Equity, the joint venture co-owned by GE Capital and GE’s NBC Universal.
Even when the M&A market was shut down, Wall Street couldn’t stop speculating about GE’s intentions for its NBC Universal unit. And now that it’s deal-making time again, the chatter is getting very noisy.
Hence the flurry of coverage over yesterday’s remarks by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, in which he said…not very much.
What do you do if you’ve got a grip on the Web/design software market? Expand into the Web measurement business, apparently. Adobe, whose Photoshop and Acrobat software offerings dominate the Web publishing business, will pay $1.8 billion to acquire Omniture, whose Web traffic measurement software is that industry’s standard.
Get used to headlines like this: Disney is buying up comic powerhouse Marvel for $4 billion. The cash and stock deal values Marvel at $50 a share, up almost 30 percent from its Friday close.
We’ll get more details during a conference call later this morning, but if you want to kill time until then, you can play amateur M&A guy and draw up your own list of big media companies that will be buying or selling in the next year or so.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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