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Strategies & Market Trends : Speculating in Takeover Targets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: richardred who wrote (3527)	11/21/2013 9:28:46 AM
From: richardred	Respond to of 7148

Yahoo!: Can’t Rule Out Large Acquisitions, Says SunTrust Shares of Yahoo! ( YHOO) are up $1.40, or 4%, at $36.03, continuing an after-hours run-up on the announcement the company extended its buyback allocation by $5 billion, and will issue $1 billion in convertible notes due 2018. As I noted last night, Citigroup’s Mark May observed the move was not a surprise, and there others who also see this as a sensible move, including SunTrust Robinson Humphrey’s Rob Peck, who has a Neutral rating on the stock. This morning Peck writes that it is “a prudent move by management, as the company works to turn around its core and return to revenue growth.” Peck “would not rule out a large acquisition by Yahoo! as it seeks to balance its long term goals and near term excess balance sheet.” “Companies such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, and Business Insider as well as video ad-tech stack companies are frequently speculated as candidates.” He’s still cautious about investing the stock, however, without further traction in the traditional ad business, even though he sees rising value, and rising payouts, in the prospective IPO of Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese e-commerce firm in which Yahoo! maintains a minority investment: blogs.barrons.com

To: richardred who wrote (3527)	12/22/2013 10:11:13 AM
From: richardred	Respond to of 7148

Oracle to Buy Responsys for $1.5 Billion By DAVID GELLES Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief of Oracle, has struggled with shareholders opposed to his $78.4 million compensation package. Updated, 12:02 p.m. \| Oracle said on Friday that it had agreed to acquire Responsys, an enterprise software company, for $27 a share in cash, or about $1.5 billion, not including debt. It is the latest acquisition for Oracle, run by Lawrence J. Ellison, and further extends the company’s reach into the realm of online marketing. Responsys makes software that allows brands to coordinate their email, mobile, display and social advertising across the web. The price amounts to a 38 percent premium above Responsys’ closing stock price of $19.52 on Thursday. “Responsys has always been focused on helping marketers realize their largest opportunity — coordinating their marketing touch points across channels, across the customer lifecycle, and across industries,” Dan Springer, chief executive of Responsys, said in a statement. “As a part of Oracle, we will only accelerate our efforts.” The board of Responsys has approved the transaction, but shareholders will have the opportunity to vote on the deal early next year. “Our strategy of combining the leaders across complementary technologies signifies Oracle’s overwhelming commitment to winning and serving the C.M.O. better than any other software company in the world,” said Oracle’s president, Mark Hurd, referring to chief marketing officers. Oracle is one of the most prolific acquirers in Silicon Valley. Including Responsys, it has bought at least seven companies this year. Earlier this year, it struck a deal for Acme Packet for $2.1 billion. Although 10 years ago, its purchases were established software companies with a large customer base, in recent years it has turned to newer-style cloud computing companies that offer their products on a per-use basis, rather than outright sale. The acquisition of Responsys follows its $871 million purchase a year ago of Eloqua, a company that made software for managing the cost and performance of marketing campaigns. Marketing is a particularly hot area, since companies now use the Internet to run ads, send emails and communicate directly with customers. The large amounts of data captured in these campaigns are analyzed by increasingly math-oriented marketing managers. Salesforce.com, a cloud-based company that competes with Oracle in sales and marketing software, has in recent years also acquired several ad purchasing and marketing companies. But Oracle has had a few rough quarters recently, missing analyst expectations twice earlier in the year before posting good quarterly results this week. Those results sent Oracle stock to its highest levels since the dotcom bubble burst more than 10 years ago. In October, Oracle shareholders opposed Mr. Ellison’s compensation package, objecting to his $78.4 million payday for the 2013 fiscal year. Responsys was part of first wave of technology companies to go public after the financial crisis, debuting on the Nasdaq market in early 2011. After opening near $15, the stock slumped as low as $5.70 about a year ago. But over the last year, the business has strengthened and shares have rallied. Thursday’s closing price was near the all time high. dealbook.nytimes.com

To: richardred who wrote (3527)	2/11/2014 9:49:21 AM
From: richardred	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7148

Google's RE:SCOR Comscore deal fits right into my social media looking for ad content theme. IMO this up's the speculative appeal what was once VCLK (name change). The company is now called CNVR Conversant. Twitter already has a TV ratings venture with Nielsen. IMO hypothetically CNVR could possibly fit. This to give them a better chance to attract advertisers. Ultimately giving them a faster profitability model. I was on the verge of purchasing SCOR, about two weeks ago but just added it to my watch list. Did Anyone Look at That Ad? By VINDU GOEL For years, the advertising industry has been struggling to address a nagging problem: Who is actually looking at those ads on a webpage or embedded in a video? About 54 percent of ads on the web are not seen by users, according to estimates by comScore, a leading online measurement and analytics firm. On Monday, comScore announced a partnership with Google, the leader in digital advertising, to help advertisers figure out who is looking at their ads — in real time, while an ad campaign is going on — so brands can make adjustments on the fly and perhaps entice more people to click. Under the deal, Google will integrate comScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) technology for measuring ad performance directly into Google’s DoubleClick ad-serving platform. Initially, the tools will be available to quickly measure how viewers are interacting with video and display ads on the desktop. Eventually, the partners plan to extend the measurements to mobile devices and other platforms, and they hope to persuade the broader advertising and media industries to support the technology. “It’s going to, for the very first time, give advertisers and publishers real-time insights into whether their campaigns are delivering,” said Neal Mohan, vice president for display advertising at Google, discussing the partnership during a speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s leadership conference in Palm Desert, Calif., on Tuesday. For Google, the partnership will bring some of the real-time analysis that advertisers can get with search ads to other types of ads. The company said the deal was part of a larger effort, which Google discussed in a blog post on Tuesday, to bring more transparency to advertising. Data on viewership of display ads, such as the banner ads that run across the top or along the side of many web pages, is typically difficult to get quickly, Mr. Mohan said in his speech. “It’s kind of like a coach giving feedback to their team after the game is lost.” For comScore, the deal validates vCE, which helps advertisers measure viewership of ads more precisely. Advertisers, meanwhile, will get faster, easier, real-time tools to assess their ads. For web publishers and media sites, Mr. Mohan suggested, better measurement will help them wrest more ad dollars from television, which gets about 60 percent of advertising spending even though people spend more of their time online than watching TV. As for web users? Perhaps we will finally see more relevant, interesting ads. bits.blogs.nytimes.com