The brutal economic downturn that’s being called “The Great Recession” is, at least in a technical sense, over. Online advertising and IT spending are inching back up, and many tech companies have seen their stock prices more than double from the lows reached in March. Even if it’s not the most robust of recoveries, it’ll do. So why are tech companies suddenly slashing jobs again?

The past couple of months have brought a renewed surge in job cuts at technology companies, including many that were undergoing second or third rounds of layoffs. Take AOL: It laid off 700 workers in early 2009. Earlier this month it cut another 100, followed by news this week that additional 1,000 would go. Those layoffs may cut operating costs, but they’re not exactly a cheap undertaking. AOL said that, all told, it will incur $283 million in restructuring charges.

With AOL’s latest round, I count 17,400 jobs that tech companies — since late October alone — have said they’ll eliminate or have done so already. There are undoubtedly many more that haven’t been officially announced. The pace is significantly slower than in January and February, when 30,000 or more job cuts were announced in a single week. But it also represents a marked increase over the spring and summer, when the bloodflow slowed to a relative trickle.

What’s driving the recent increase in job cuts? A few things. Companies are drawing up budgets for 2010, and it’s common for them to eliminate some positions in November and December (however heartless this seems from a human standpoint). But the cuts often extend into the new year, which suggests the bloodletting could continue for a couple of more months.

Different companies have different reasons for the restructurings. M&A activity has also been on the rise in the tech industry, and integrating two separate operations into one often means some workers must go. Adobe reduced its head count by 9 percent in conjunction with its $1.8 billion acquisition of web analytics firm Omniture, for example.

Other companies are cutting because, despite a sense of relief that the worst economic pain is behind us, much uncertainty lies ahead. Applied Materials said it would cut between 1,300 and 1,500 positions, even though it reported an increase in sales and orders. When facing uncertainty, cutting costs has a strategic appeal: It shields you from sluggish demand, and keeps profits — and the stock price — high in the meantime.

Still others are being buffeted by rapid changes in their core markets and are paying the price for failing to keep up, such as Microsoft, which announced 5,000 job cuts in January and recently eliminated another 800. Microsoft is not only seeing netbook sales put downward pressure profit margins of its PC operating software, but Windows Mobile is facing daunting competition from Android and others.

Some of the biggest rounds of layoffs have come from other companies having trouble coping with evolving markets: Nokia, struggling for a foothold in the thriving smartphone market, is shedding as many as 5,700 jobs. Sprint, facing disappointing sales of the Palm Pre will cut up to 2,500. And AOL has been floundering in its search for a role on the web for years.

Not all tech companies will be cutting positions. A recent survey by Robert Half Technology, an employment consulting firm, found that 43 percent of CIOs interviewed see retaining workers as their top staffing priority. And companies that follow one round of layoffs with another may regret it in the end. Too many layoffs send a bad message to customers and partners, while chasing away the top talent. That can cause even more problems, and more layoffs, instead of a real recovery.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  15 Comments
Tags: Adobe, AOL, economy, Jobs, layoffs, Microsoft

Of all the dot-com superstars that appeared in the ’90s, shone brightly and then disappeared from sight, few have been granted a second act. One exception is Priceline, which 11 years after it was founded — and 10 years after its stock price collapsed — is quietly thriving. It’s no superstar now, but it’s an interesting case study of how an online company once written off for dead can in fact age gracefully.

At its peak, Priceline’s “name-your-own-price” business model created a stir. Its founder, Jay Walker, trumpeted the idea as a revolution that would upend the travel industry, and a lot of smart people bought it. George Soros and Paul Allen invested their money, and the stock surged to a $15.7 billion market cap, larger than most airlines. Forbes called Walker a “modern-day Edison,” and Priceline expanded into new markets like gasoline and groceries.

The revolution was over before it began. Priceline’s stock peaked nearly a year before the Nasdaq did, and it just kept falling: By the end of 2000, its market cap had shrunk by 99 percent to $220 million. Forbes regretted its praise for Walker, admitting he “hasn’t lived up to our label,” and Walker left the company soon after. Priceline backed out of the gasoline and grocery businesses, retreating to online travel, where it faced increasing competition from Expedia, Orbitz and others.

But writing off Priceline as another failed dot-com also proved premature. Its approach wasn’t revolutionary after all, but neither was it a bad idea. Somewhat ironically, it took another market crash for Priceline to begin to deliver on its promise. Its stock, which has risen 265 percent in the past year, has joined the S&P 500 — the market’s way of saying you’ve finally arrived. Its capitalization is back above $7 billion, making it larger than Expedia.

In the first six months of 2009, Priceline booked $4.3 billion in travel services, an increase of 12 percent during a period when overall bookings declined by 8 percent. The company will update those numbers for the third quarter next week, and analysts are expecting bookings to grow by more than 25 percent, faster than many of Priceline’s online rivals.

What changed for Priceline? Its management avoided the hype about the revolutionary potential of naming your own price. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy did refer to it in commercials, but Priceline waited patiently for the concept to take root — the way Amazon has been patient about free shipping, or Netflix has been about streaming movies online with no extra fee. The company has also expanded piecemeal, buying up smaller companies like Bookings.com when it could, and expanding abroad. It now offers travel in 78 countries.

There’s a lesson in Priceline’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story for other Web companies. A lot of people watching tech companies — especially ones like me who write about them — get all antsy about their ability to deliver on their promise. This comes up when we talk about companies like Facebook not being public yet, or Twitter looking for revenue.

But often, consumers move at a much slower rate. It can take years to grow comfortable with a new business model. There is a lot to be said about moving quickly in a fast-evolving industry. But there’s just as much to be said about being patient with the people who are going to make you money.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments
Tags: dot-com bust, EXPE, Expedia, Jay Walker, online travel, PCLN, Priceline, william shatner

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was in fine form this week, telling the crowd assembled for the company’s analyst day that after only 14 years, Yahoo had “somehow got boring,” declaring its 6 percent operating margin as “pathetic” and announcing the start of “good times” that will leave those bad old times (hello, Jerry Yang) in the past. Then came the juicy little sound bite, which echoed for days. “We have fallen and we really want to get back up.”

It’s become the Bartz shtick: Blast Yahoo’s current malaise as unacceptable, tweak the old management and then vow to fix things — fast. It never fails to entertain the press, and sometimes it even gives the stock a small bump.

But if you want to convince your users and investors that you’re truly focused on the future, you may not want to quote a 20-year-old TV commercial. And does Yahoo really want poor Mrs. Fletcher as its new mascot? Better not to remind everyone that purple is also the color of bruises.

Granted, turning around a $7 billion-a-year company takes time. Bartz has been making hard decisions, cutting deadwood and reassembling a Byzantine management structure into something that works. But her song and dance is starting to wear thin. Many of the people she’s relying on to turn things around were at Yahoo in the bad old days, and don’t enjoy being thrown under a bus to please analysts. Yahoo still has a lot of creative, skilled people responsible for properties to which many users remain loyal. It’s not their fault that top management couldn’t make more money from them.

But the bigger, more immediate issue for Yahoo is that it’s running out of time. Overseas markets are growing fast, and Yahoo needs to grab a piece of them early. Tech startups are seeing a wave of M&A activity, and the cream of the crop will be acquired first. Above all, the web is shifting, from static pages to social media, from search to discovery, and the long-term leadership of that new web is still up for grabs.

Yahoo is a dark horse in the race for the social web, even though it has a lot going for it. It has hundreds of millions of users, and partnerships with many heavily trafficked sites. It has long, deep relationships with the biggest advertisers online, as well as the community of developers writing the Internet’s next act. What it doesn’t have, despite Flickr’s initial success, is any momentum in social media. The harder it races to catch up, the further it seems to fall back.

If Yahoo is really focused on the future, it needs to anticipate where its competitors will be in six months, not just catch up to where they are today. Luckily for Yahoo, Facebook tipped its hand to developers this week, hinting at major changes that it’s planning for the next six months. Its Open Graph API, for example, is an attempt to move Facebook features beyond its walled garden and onto other sites. To attract developers, Facebook must draw a nice little road map, one that Yahoo would be smart to study.

Yahoo needs to stop talking about being amazing again, and simply amaze. And who knows? Maybe Bartz’s comments are intended as a distraction from something big Yahoo has planned. After all, it’s building its new 3-million-square-foot headquarters in Santa Clara – enough to house 11,000 workers. That’s a big gesture showing Yahoo is confident of future success. Or maybe it just means that, if Yahoo can’t find new ways to monetize the web, it can instead rent out office space to someone who can.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: Carol Bartz, Yahoo

Updated: PayPal opening up its payment processing API to developers, hoping to unleash new apps that use its electronic payment service, sounds somewhat anti-climactic. After all, most of the other brand-name web companies that emerged in the late 90s — including PayPal’s parent, eBay — have been doing that for years.

But the strategy puts PayPal at an important crossroads: One path leads to PayPal being just one of many e-payment companies vying for attention as online commerce evolves; the other gives PayPal what may be its last serious shot at unseating the credit card companies. What direction PayPal takes isn’t really up to the company — rather it will come down to the apps that developers build using the company’s technology, and how common they become.

Back in 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, the startup looked poised to depose credit cards and checks as payment methods of choice. But as is often the case where money is concerned, there were complications. Frauds and phishers scared away some users, others were put off by poor customer service. Untangling regulations set before the Internet era slowed things down further.

But the biggest barriers were the credit card companies and their bank members –- PayPal needed the cooperation of the very institutions it was trying to compete against. So for years, PayPal was focused on eBay’s e-commerce platform; it wasn’t until eBay’s purchase of BillMeNow BillMeLater that PayPal was finally able to build deeper relationships with sites like Walmart.com. It’s now used by 44 of the top 100 retail sites.

More recently, two trends have gotten underway, both of which stand to benefit PayPal. First, consumer appetites have turned against using credit cards. Not only are people more averse to debt, many banks are raising their annual fees even for cardholders with good credit. Second, online payments are on the verge of a dramatic evolution thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices as well as social sites like Facebook. It’s not just that these changes are creating an app economy, it’s that any economic engine needs oil to run smoothly, and e-payments are that oil.

The tricky part for PayPal is that it’s not the only one trying to benefit from these trends. Google has made its Checkout available on mobile devices. Nokia’s purchase of a stake in Obopay is helping it develop Nokia Money, another mobile payment system. Amazon’s Flexible Payment System, built on its payments infrastructure, is another daunting rival, as would any offering from Apple that was integrated into iTunes.

To outrun those competitors, PayPal needs to win over more consumers with a payment system that is reliable, intuitively simple and secure. Over the years, PayPal has gained some ground, but still has work to do. More importantly, it needs to win the trust of developers. It’s their creativity — and their sense of how the web is changing consumer behavior — that will reshape the way money is transferred online. Its Paypal X Innovate developers conference next month could be a deciding moment in winning that trust.

PayPal may have been slow to open up its API, but the company’s development has always been careful and complicated. And because the future of online payments itself an open question, it has a rare chance to expand its role. Whether it succeeds or simply remains an also-ran in the sector, however, is up to the web’s community of developers.

Updated: There were two errors in the PayPal post. We wrote that Nokia bought Obopay, but instead they bought a stake in the mobile payments start-up. Also, we incorrectly referred to BillMeLater as BillMeNow. The errors are regretted and have been fixed.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  14 Comments
Tags: developers, e-Commerce, eBay, payments, paypal

Google said this week it might buy a big company “every year or two,” targeting “some accelerant that it would provide for revenue, some major, major user base that we did not currently have access to.” What’s surprising isn’t that Google is thinking this way, but that it’s admitting it so publicly. In the sometimes feverish world of M&A (and right now is one of those times), those are rousing words.

Schmidt surely knows this from his years as an executive, but if Google is really buying, it might make sense to pretend it’s not. In the Internet sector, just hinting such a thing when you have $22 billion in your back pocket (while generating nearly $3 billion from operations last quarter) can spur rumors, and rumors can drive up company valuations. There are already rumors that Google’s going on a big buying binge, setting its sights on the likes of Akamai (Adam Kramer shot that one down already).

So while it’s tempting to speculate on what Google should buy, let’s look instead at what Google could buy, but shouldn’t. I’ve argued before that, given the history of M&A in the web sector, a surge of new deals could end up like a 2 a.m. barroom — a place where thoughtless but impulsive decisions can lead to regrets. So here are four deals that might seem tempting, but would be best to forgo.

Hulu

Why it could happen: YouTube hasn’t turned a profit. Hulu has. Why? We’ll watch a commercial per break (or two, as seems increasingly common) for Jon Stewart or Tina Fey, but not for the Drunk Kardashians or TV for Chickens. Networks are starting to press harder on Hulu, limiting its offerings. Hulu could help kick YouTube down its path to profitability. Hulu could also make Google even more dominant presence in online video than it is now.

Why it shouldn’t: Hulu could make Google an even more dominant presence in online video than it is now. No one — whether studios or viewers — is crying out for Google to be more dominant. Also, I find Hulu’s interface to be superior. YouTube’s is still too devoted to its original design, as if its users would freak out if a new interface from scratch brought a better viewing experience. Also, as Om has argued, Yahoo is a better fit for Hulu. Besides, someone has to compete with Google in video.

eBay

Why it could happen: eBay’s marketplace business doesn’t really fit into Google’s business plan, although if things keep turning around, it could contribute to revenue growth. Checkout has never taken off, but PayPal could strengthen Google’s e-payments options while offering PayPal access to new shoppers and retailers. Skype could just offer an end run around the obstacles that AT&T and Apple are tossing in front of Google Voice. And Google’s legal clout might even help Skype in its battle with the VoIP services’s founders.

Why it shouldn’t: Mixing a company with a few silos of independent units (eBay) with another company with such a broad vision, one that it’s sprawling in all kinds of areas (Google), would create a nightmare of integration. The 77 percent rise in eBay’s shares so far this year, which gave it a $32 billion valuation as of Friday, also makes it less than a bargain. Google would need to pay largely with its stock, and such a big deal would be dilutive to investors (including Google employees), especially if other big deals are on the table.

Twitter or Facebook

Why it could happen: Early reviewers of Google Wave are largely impressed by the technology but puzzled by the strategy. Wave is more of a collaborative tool — a gun aimed at Sharepoint rather than Facebook or Twitter — which leaves Google still largely absent in the social media landscape. Facebook could add to Google’s revenue, while either company would offer the kind of “major user base” to which Schmidt referred. Why it shouldn’t: From a financial perspective, a Google purchase wouldn’t help Facebook or Twitter, neither of which is hurting for capital. And from a strategic perspective, it could hurt. Both are still innovating services that are in the early stages of development. The task of integrating their technologies with Google would slow that process down. That would be bad for users of Facebook and Twitter, and it would take out exactly the kind of competitors Google needs as it strives to innovate in the social media arena.

Talk about Google buying these companies isn’t new, but chatter is likely to pick up now that Schmidt has tipped Google’s M&A hand. While deals involving smaller, search-oriented companies like Russian engine Yandex and mobile-ad company Jumptap would make sense, it’s hard to imagine Google buying a bigger, established company without creating more problems than it aims to be solving.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: eBay, Eric Schmidt, facebook, GOOG, google, Hulu, m&a, mergers, Twitter

The past week was one of the best eBay has seen in a long time. AT&T said it will soon allow VoIP calls over its 3G network, a move that will boost Skype’s allure as eBay moves to sell it. And a federal appeals court dismissed patent claims against the voice, video and messaging application. But more importantly, evidence is emerging that the long, awkward and painful turnaround of the marketplace business is really underway.

Sales through some 3,000 eBay merchants rose 4.6 percent in August and 5.1 percent in September, according to ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce services company that tracks data from its clients (and that eBay holds a minority stake in). That compared to sales declines in each of the the previous 12 months. That reversal of fortunes helped prompt Kaufman Brothers analyst Aaron Kessler to upgrade eBay to buy from hold and to lift his price target to $29 a share from $22. (Shares of eBay closed Friday at $24.42, up 7.6 percent on the week.) That comes on the heels of two other upgrades, from UBS and Bernstein Research, respectively, as well as a revised price target from Barclays.

In his report, Kessler noted that:

The ChannelAdvisor data is indicating a low single-digit increase in U.S. same store sales for 3Q – we would note that over the last three quarters the ChannelAdvisor data has shown a strong correlation and, on average, tracked 2 percent above the reported gross merchandise value data.

Consumers may finally be warming up to the new eBay. The company’s meteoric rise as an auction-oriented e-commerce site turned it into a cultural phenomenon, but cultural phenomenons can fade away as quickly as they emerge. And while CEO John Donahoe often said that he didn’t see Amazon as a chief competitor to eBay, the fact is that many bargain hunters were, in the long run, looking for the kind of seamless, intuitive interface and security they could easily find through Amazon and its merchants.

Donahoe’s solution was a top-to-bottom renovation of the marketplace, redesigning pages and beefing up search, downplaying auctions in favor of buy-it-now sales, and rewarding top sellers while driving away smaller ones. For a couple of years, the result was a messy muddle. Consumers lost their sense of what eBay was, exactly, and shopped elsewhere. Many alienated sellers protested angrily, creating a protracted PR nightmare for the company.

But like many messy renovations, the final result is often worth the wait. The new eBay offers a compelling alternative to any e-commerce site out there, including Amazon. Free shipping, easy access to trusted merchants, a broad inventory and an intuitive and useful search interface are starting to lure back not just consumers, as ChannelAdvisor’s data shows, but also investors. eBay’s stock is up 74 percent this year, compared with a 35 percent rise in the Nasdaq.

eBay still has a long way to go. Skype is still facing a daunting lawsuit from its founders, one that could complicate eBay’s plans to sell it off. PayPal will face more competition from Google and, reportedly, Facebook and Apple. And its marketplace business needs to nurture the recovery that has taken root. During its troubled years, many people (including me) knocked the company and questioned its prospects. But Donahoe’s turnaround looks to be working.

Gone is the fun and freewheeling arcade of auction-mania that drove eBay’s success in its early years. What’s left is something blander — but more importantly, something that’s beginning to resonate with online shoppers.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  18 Comments
Tags: Donahoe, eBay, turnaround

Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe is hooking up with Omniture and Intuit with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon. But is a wave of mergers necessarily a good thing?

Not always. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gained 15 percent last quarter alone – and so are their cash stockpiles: Microsoft is sitting on $49 billion in cash; Google, $24 billion. The IPO market is coming back to life, but not enough to meet the pent-up demand. And high-profile deals like the ones we’ve seen recently have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

The risk is that, just as the quality of IPOs tends to deteriorate the longer a market boom lasts, a wave of M&A deals will bring on marriages that make less and less sense. Sure, Amazon buying Zappos was a good transaction all around, as was Facebook’s investment in Friendfeed. But we’re already seeing some that, from a user standpoint, are questionable. As a fan of Mint, am I really going to benefit from its purchase by Intuit? When your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations.

Internet mergers rarely happen for the reason they do in older industries — to cut costs through consolidation. More often, they involve an aging company buying a young, promising one to amp up revenue growth. TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

Yet expectations are high that more web mergers are on the way. Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart, argued in a report this week that growing confidence in the economy and broader adoption of the Internet will keep deals coming. He lists 20 startups and matches them with five Internet giants.

Aggarwals’ report has some interesting points, so it may be unfair to nitpick over some potential matches. But just because, say, Microsoft could easily buy SecondLife, Yahoo could go after Digg or eBay, Zillow, should they? Many of the deals would benefit investors more than users, and that’s often a recipe for a messy marriage. There are times when mergers make sense, but for web companies, now is not one of those times.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: Adobe, google, Intuit, IPO, Microsoft, Mint, omniture, Sandeep Aggarwal, tech M&A

Raising $100 million is newsworthy for any company, but when it happened to Twitter this week, it also seemed to raise a hundred million eyebrows. Most notable was the company’s $1 billion valuation, which was labeled “exospheric” and “a new manifestation of the dot-com bubble” and invoked numerous comparisons to 1999 — aka, the Year of Investing Dangerously. But are Twitter’s new investors really crazy? Not at all.

The skeptics have a point: From the perspective of fundamental analysis, there’s no rationale here whatsoever. The private investment valued Twitter at the same $1 billion as the public markets have accorded companies like TiVo, which saw revenue of $250 million in its last fiscal year, and Ariba, which made $330 million. Google is trading around seven times its revenue — using that ratio, Twitter should be raking in about $140 million annually.

As is often pointed out, Twitter has yet to make a dollar, and may not do so by the time we reach the end of 2009. Meanwhile, the company is facing a series of tech glitches, slowing traffic and a reluctance among mainstream users to embrace it as they have Facebook. With $100 million, Twitter, which employs 60 people, can hire another 500 and pay them $75,000 each for the next two-and-a-half years. By then, surely one of them will have figured out a way to make a buck.

But Twitters’ new investors have at least two options. The first, of course, is getting Twitter to make money, which isn’t beyond the pale. There is evidence that Twitterers are for some reason more likely to click on an ad, and if that doesn’t work Twitter can just buy one of the companies that makes money through its service. The harder part is making a profit and keeping it growing.

That may or may not happen in the next few years, which brings us to the investors’ second option. A cynical one, in my view, since it relies on the greater fool theory, which says that you can ignore fundamental analysis as long as you sell out at a higher price to someone even more reckless with their money than you are. The last decade has seen many tech and media giants all too happy to play the greater fool: Time-Warner with AOL, eBay with Skype, Google with YouTube, News Corp with MySpace. Even when the acquired company started churning out a profit, it was often too puny to justify the sale price.

The buzz around Twitter is so loud, and media companies are so awkward about using social media that they’ll jump at the chance to buy the startup and make it their own. But if past is prologue, here is what’s likely to happen: A rival (Facebook, Google) will find a way to steal market share from Twitter. Twitter will poke around for potential buyers, likely a media giant that has more cash than it does instinct for social media. Twitter’s new owner will plaster the service with ads, alienating longtime users and shrinking its market share even more. By then, Twitter’s early investors will have cashed out.

In the meantime, the Twitter investment does not herald another tech bubble. The IPO market is shifting into a higher gear this week, but valuations of tech IPOs like Vitacost.com — an online retailer trading at two times revenue — are nowhere near the insane levels of 1999. Similarly, as PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA noted recently, venture investments in 2009 will be on par with those of 1996, well before the dot-com bubble. Twitter may be a one-company bubble, but that doesn’t mean it’s a regrettable investment.

At least not right now.

Image courtesy of Twitter.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  32 Comments
Tags: bubble, investment, Twitter, valuation

Here’s a confession I’m a little uneasy making: I still read the newspaper every day. Not an online version, but an old-school, physical newspaper — the New York Times lands on my lawn each morning. I won’t leaf through the pages until the evening, digging into stories I missed during the day’s chaotic rush. But while the same stories have been online for hours, sometimes a day or more, there’s something about the newspaper — its layout, its tried-and-true design, even its faint scent of dried pulp and ink — that makes the print product simpler, and more pleasurable, to devour. The Internet may be killing print papers, but it’s miles from replicating the experience of them.

So much energy is needed to tailor web pages to myriad platforms — rival browsers, news feeds, mobile devices and, soon, tablets — that there is little time left to do the harder work of making the experience of consuming news online an emotionally satisfying one. Which it isn’t yet. And that’s why Google’s Fast Flip announcement this week was so interesting. It’s time, the company was saying, for the web to offer a news interface that rivals magazines and newsprint. Fast Flip isn’t anywhere near to doing that; its gallery of pre-loaded news page images is so crude that initial reviews were pretty harsh. But with Fast Flip, Google tipped its hand to a much broader, ambitious strategy: Google has said for years it doesn’t want to be a media company, and it doesn’t. Google wants to be the media company.

News publishers have been complaining that Google’s intentions are hostile, that it wants to steal their revenue and slowly strangle them to death. That’s not, strictly speaking, true. Google just wants to own them. It’s not a vampire; it simply sees itself as a benevolent dictator — maybe even a philosopher king. Google needs news publishers, otherwise the web will turn into, as Eric Schmidt said, a cesspool. So it plans to stand at the front end of all that news. Newsrooms will take a share of the revenue, but to do so they’ll have to play the role of an outsourced vendor, much in the same way auto parts makers are paid to contribute their goods to what become standalone vehicles.

To be that standalone media company, Google has been taking quiet little babysteps — baby tiptoes, really. It submitted a proposal to the Newspaper Association of America offering an enticing blend of micropayments, subscription billing, ad revenue and reader data (it’s worth reading if only to note how Google ingeniously couches itself as a vendor to publishers, not the other way around). It added a Spotlight section to Google News that highlights stories that meets its definition of “in-depth” journalism.

And now, it’s clear that Google is working to knock down the last, elegant column supporting that print format: its fast, comfortable and intuitive interface.

Google wants a partnership with newsrooms the way Britain wanted a partnership with its colonies. In an era when ink and paper have given way to algorithms and interfaces, Google has such an advantage it’s not even a fair fight. Forget what Google says about its vision of organizing all the world’s information – a mandate broad enough to justify nearly any campaign – the company faces a problem no matter how powerful it gets: It needs to keep growing revenue.

And news publishers? Well, it’s good and bad. The good is, they’ll always have a home in the Google Empire. The bad is, they’ll have to share more of their online revenue with Google. And they’ll have to kiss their brands good-bye.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  15 Comments
Tags: fast flip, GOOG, google, Media, philosopher king

Two weeks ago, an appeals court shot down an FCC rule that had prevented any single cable company from controlling more than 30 percent of U.S. TV subscriptions. While a few reports noted then that the decision could spur consolidation in the cable industry, the discussion didn’t gain much traction until this week, when a Citigroup analyst argued in favor of a merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But there was also this comment from Steve Burke, Comcast’s chief operating officer, who after noting that while the company might make a modest acquisition at the right price, said, “We don’t wake up every day saying, how do we get bigger in cable?”

Right. And drug addicts don’t wake up every morning saying, “How do I get a fix?” After all, what company wouldn’t want more revenue, or a bigger market share? It was in Comcast’s interest to fight this case to an appeals court, just as it’s in its interest to dampen speculation of any pending deal, which could spark a rally in the companies’ shares and as such, make a tie-up that much more expensive. But in the end, Comcast, as well as other pay-TV companies that might see the ruling as a green light for acquisitions, may not be helped by being bigger. Broadband cable and satellite companies are already facing competition from the web as more video content, and more eyeballs, migrate there.

The appeals court said that, because of new offerings from the likes of DirectTV Verizon and AT&T, cable operators “no longer have the bottleneck power over programming that concerned the Congress in 1992.” That concern, of course, helped pass the the Telecom Act of 1996, which aimed to deregulate the industry and foster competition, but in the end drew charges that it just created a bottleneck power over programming that’s still in place today.

Some analysts believe a big merger of pay-TV companies would still be unlikely, because the FCC may appeal to the Supreme Court or because regulators could still block a deal on antitrust concerns. But Citigroup’s Jason Bazinet said the regulatory barriers would be low even for Comcast and Time Warner since the two companies control only 37 percent of the market — big enough to provide $12 billion in cost benefits, but small enough to avoid a monopoly.

Still, a big merger could spur others in the industry. The Journal pointed out:

The ruling not only said cableco’s could buy other cableco’s. But that any TV subscription company could buy another. ATT could buy Time Warner Cable. DirectTV could merge with Comcast, and the two could buy Charter or Cox.

What would a wave of mergers in the pay-TV industry look like? If past is prologue, less competition in the industry would lead to higher rates. That in turn could spur even more subscribers to seek out video entertainment on the web. Many onetime cable subscribers, including me, have canceled their accounts after finding access to beloved content like baseball games and movies on MLB.com, Netflix Watch Now and iTunes.

There will always be subscribers to good TV content. But in time, fewer will be subscribing through the cable/satellite companies of today. As tempting as mega-mergers may be to those companies right now, they may only speed up their irrelevance.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, feature

It may have only lasted 100 minutes, but the Great Gmail Outage of last week generated discussion that endured for days. It started with panic attacks on Twitter and took some bizarre turns, such as sparking talk of lawsuits. But in the end, the fact of the outage wasn’t nearly as interesting as what it said about Google, about email and about us. Here are five lessons that Gfail had to offer:

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  15 Comments
Tags: gfail, gmail, GOOG, google, Outage

The S&P 500 is up 50 percent from its March lows, a rebound that has helped to thaw the IPO market from the deep freeze it entered last fall. Twenty-one companies have gone public on U.S. markets so far this year, 10 of them technology firms. And according to Renaissance Capital, those 10 tech IPOs are up an average of 30 percent from their offering prices.

So the tech IPO market is back, right? Judging from the tone of investors and bankers, you might think so. As Michael Copeland of Fortune noted this week:

Now, according to one prominent venture capitalist who asked to remain anonymous, investment bankers are telling him, “If a company can show revenue of $15 million per quarter, a good business model – and if not profitability, a path to profits – they can deliver an oversubscribed offering.”

There’s just one problem. While Wall Street is ready to throw a big IPO party for startups, few have indicated they plan to show up. The period between September and November is often a heady one for IPOs. But companies typically file their prospectuses three to six months ahead of their planned debut and at this point, few have done so — especially in the tech sector.

So far this year, according to Renaissance, 37 companies have filed for IPOs, down 73 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, 38 companies have withdrawn their planned offerings. What’s more, among the tech companies that have gone public, the amounts raised are smaller than last year: $200 million on average, compared $650 million in 2008.

Tech companies are especially quiet. The list of firms that have filed for IPOs since June is dominated by financial and consumer companies –- only four on that list are in tech, including Fortinet, a maker of network security software, and genealogical site Ancestry.com. Conspicuously absent from the list is a marquee name like Facebook, which is adamant that it won’t file for an IPO until next year at the earliest .

While it’s encouraging that the stock market’s rally this summer hasn’t ignited a speculative rush among IPO candidates, you have to wonder why things are so quiet. Technology startups are usually a big part of the IPO pipeline. Despite the long drought in venture-backed stock offerings, the need for capital and the hunger among VCs for exit strategies, there is little pent-up demand for listings.

So why the reluctance? Apparently a belief that things are not looking up from here. Commentators who called the March bottom are now sayingthe rally is over. TrimTabs Investment Research, which tracks market liquidity, says corporate insiders sold $6 billion worth of shares in August. Insider selling is often a sign that companies see a market top, and this month insiders sold a record 30 times as much as they bought.

Like any corner of the financial markets, IPOs can be ruled by greed or fear. IPO activity has been distorted by greed many times in the past, but for now, fear seems to be the predominant feeling.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments

Waiting for eBay to spin off Skype into the stock market? Don’t hold your breath. A legal battle with a company controlled by Skype’s founders could delay the move until at least the second half of next year — and possibly put the entire offering into jeopardy.

eBay said back in April that it intends to separate Skype from its core operations by spinning it out via an initial public offering in the first half of 2010, a plan CEO John Donahoe called “the best path” for Skype. Just last week, he reaffirmed that point, adding that the “synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal.” The specific timing of the IPO, according to eBay, would depend on market conditions.

But according to the company’s 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission filed Wednesday, a legal dispute over the licensing of Skype’s peer-to-peer technology from Joltid Ltd., which is controlled by Skype’s founders, could complicate those plans. eBay is in the midst of a slow turnaround and could use the cash a Skype IPO would bring to lay the groundwork for its future growth.

In March — a month before it announced plans for the Skype IPO — eBay filed a claim against Joltid related to the license in the English High Court of Justice. Joltid responded by terminating the license agreement between the two companies. According to eBay’s claim:

Joltid has alleged that Skype should not possess, use or modify certain software source code and that, by doing so, and by disclosing such code in certain U.S. patent cases pursuant to orders from U.S. courts, Skype has breached the license agreement.

The usual legal snipes ensued, with Joltid alleging in a counterclaim that eBay and Skype were infringing its copyright. Skype, meanwhile, asked the court to declare that it’s not in breach of the licensing agreement. The outcome is unclear, but without a resolution with Joltid the whole dispute won’t go to court until June of next year. That will delay a Skype IPO by months at best and, depending on the outcome, could hurt its chances of ever seeing the light of day.

In the filing, after noting that it’s confident of its legal position, eBay said ominously:

[T]here is the possibility of an adverse result if the matter is not resolved through negotiation. Skype has begun to develop alternative software to that licensed through Joltid. However, such software development may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive. If Skype was to lose the right to use the Joltid software as the result of the litigation, and if alternative software was not available, Skype would be severely and adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible.

Although Skype hasn’t been integrated into eBay’s e-commerce business, as the company hoped it would be when the acquisition was announced, it has been an area of growth for eBay. Skype’s revenue grew 26 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to $145 million as registered users increased by 47 percent to 405 million.

Skype has to be one of the most expensive albatrosses to ever hang from the neck of a Silicon Valley company. After spending $2.6 billion to buy it in 2005, eBay later wrote down the value to $1.7 billion. Skype has grown while under eBay’s control, but continues to stand apart from its parent’s other operations, like an unwanted stepchild.

And yet eBay still licenses the peer-to-peer technology from the company’s founders. How could eBay spend billions on a company and not have control over the technology behind it?

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  22 Comments
Tags: eBay, John Donahoe, JoltID, skpe

At first glance, it looks like eBay and Amazon are swapping fortunes. eBay’s stock rose 11 percent the day after it posted second-quarter earnings this week, while Amazon’s stock dropped 8 percent in the wake of its own report. Amazon reported better numbers — its revenue in the latest three-month period rose 14 percent over the second quarter of 2008, to $4.65 billion, while its earnings per share declined to 32 cents from 37 cents. eBay, meanwhile, said revenue fell 5 percent to $2.1 billion and earnings came in at 25 cents a share vs. 35 cents the year before. Watching eBay shares outperform Amazon may seem odd, but it’s been going on for some time. Since the market bottomed out in early March, eBay’s stock has more than doubled while Amazon’s has risen 40 percent.

What’s going on? Is eBay really faring that much better than Amazon? Well, no — it’s just set lower expectations. Earlier this year, analysts and investors, noticing that eBay was floundering in the recession while Amazon thrived, feared CEO John Donahoe’s efforts to turn the company around were backfiring. There have since been signs of improvement, however. For example, the value of goods sold on the site in the second quarter rose for the first time since 2007.

In other words, the rally in eBay shares is due, in large part, to relief.

Gone is the eBay that Meg Whitman tried to create — a cultural phenomenon and growth machine where Skype would somehow make eBay’s auctions more useful. Under Donahoe, eBay hopes to eke out growth by selling used or refurbished goods, doesn’t plan to make any more major acquisitions, and sees Skype as simply a way to raise cash in the future. It’s resigned (or at least it appears to have) to sacrifice ambition and accept a humbler, grayer future. But at least it’s turning things around.

And while Amazon did see some disappointing media sales in its store last quarter, its larger story is still a compelling one. Its purchase of Zappos was welcomed as a shrewd, timely and modestly priced deal. The Kindle is paving the way for future e-book revenue. And the company has been patiently building a new source of revenue from cloud computing services, which could return more profits in future years.

Back in late 2005, after eBay announced it was overpaying for Skype, its market cap stood around $65 billion. Today, even after its stock has doubled in the past four months, its market cap stands at $27 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon’s market cap has gone from $19 billion in late 2005 to $37 billion today.

eBay may be on its way back, but it’s hard to imagine it returning to the glory days of earlier this decade. Amazon’s best days, on the other hand, may still lie ahead.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  17 Comments
Tags: Amazon, AMZN, e-Commerce, earnings, eBay, stock

Is the recession over already? Intel and IBM this week posted stronger-than-expected numbers and raised guidance for future quarters, pushing the Nasdaq 7.5 percent higher and inspiring some to hope a recovery was imminent, if not already here.

But with all due respect to the bulls (and apologies to Richard Fariña), the tech industry has been down so long it only looks like up. Maybe the past year has been so grim and disorienting we’re willing to redefine what a successful quarter looks like. But while it’s one thing to credit a company with managing a severe downturn competently, it’s quite another to declare the worst is over when there are no clear signs that revenue will be rebounding.

Intel’s second-quarter earnings were described as “stellar” and possibly heralding a recovery. So it’s somewhat jarring to look at the numbers and see that in fact revenue fell 15 percent from the same quarter a year ago and the company swung to loss of 7 cents a share (excluding a fine imposed by the European Commission, Intel posted a profit of 18 cents a share, down 10 cents over last year). The stock has rallied 11 percent on the numbers largely because analysts were expecting them to be much worse.

In its conference call with analysts, Intel executives offered little confidence in an actual recovery. CEO Paul Otellini said that even with Windows 7 due this fall, he doesn’t expect businesses to increase spending until some time next year. Sales to consumers remain as uncertain and unpredictable as ever. Any strength Intel saw last quarter came from stimulus spending in China and customers restocking inventories that they cleared out late last year. None of this points to a solid recovery.

IBM also delivered what was greeted as a “walkoff home run.” Although revenue was down 13 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, earnings per share rose 18 percent to $2.32. And while earnings growth in a weak economy is without question good news for investors, it’s a little harder to argue that this augurs a turnaround for tech.

IBM not only spent $1.7 billion last quarter to buy back shares of its stock, but so far this year it’s laid off 10,000 of its workers. Layoffs are a brutal if effective way to weather a recession, but to say that IBM has turned a corner simply because it’s cutting costs faster than its revenue is falling doesn’t make sense.

The cautionary note in Google’s slowing sales is a better indicator of where things stand with technology companies in general. The search giant eked out 4.5 percent growth in net revenue last quarter, down from 43 percent a year earlier. While CEO Eric Schmidt was “pleased” with Google’s performance in the downturn, he was also blunt in declaring that “It’s too early for us to tell when the recovery will materialize.”

I don’t mean to belittle what these companies have accomplished in the recession. But there is a sense among some investors and financial publications that a corner is being turned. It’s too early to start popping corks from champagne bottles. For that, we’ll need to wait until up once again looks like up.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: google, IBM, Intel, nasdaq, recovery, tech

Count me among the skeptics who see Google’s Chrome OS announcement this week as, first and foremost, an effort to induce pain in its longtime rival Microsoft. And a pointless one at that.

Many people writing about Chrome OS have argued that there’s a sound business strategy behind it, that of leading to more Google ads for us to click on. While I agree in principle, I also think it’s easy to overstate the benefit to Google: Isn’t most of its revenue already coming from surfers using Windows-based PCs? And yes, many PCs take minutes to boot up and hours to configure – as Google cattily pointed out in arguing how computers (read: Windows) “need to get better” — but will we really use the time saved to click on sponsored links? I doubt it.

Microsoft’s operating software isn’t stealing ad revenue from Google, but if Chrome OS is broadly adopted — a big if for now — it would devastate Microsoft’s profits. Putting such a stake in Microsoft’s cold heart has been a dream inspiring Google’s founders since the company’s earliest days, long before it made much strategic sense.

There’s a similar logic here to Google’s attempt to forge a revenue-sharing partnership with Yahoo, which would have incrementally improved Google’s own revenue had antitrust concerns not derailed it. Google didn’t really need that deal. Rather it was looking to deprive Microsoft of a search asset it very badly wanted, because it believes that if Microsoft loses, it wins. Even if winning is just schadenfreude.

Google’s desire to beat Microsoft goes well beyond its other rivalries. Yahoo has long posed a more direct threat to Google’s ad revenue, but the competitive spirit was always a productive one, and the goal seemed to be a better experience for the web user. Twitter’s real-time search looms as a new threat, but Google has nothing but respect for the company. But Microsoft? The overriding goal is to cause pain.

And that may explain why Google is announcing an operating software that won’t actually be used by many consumers until well over a year from now. Forget that the web and open-source software will all have all evolved significantly by the fall of 2010; the news of Chrome OS has dominated the tech news cycle just as buzz for Windows 7 was building. Google did something similar when Microsoft unveiled Bing, stealing the PR thunder with its own announcement of Google Wave.

Silicon Valley companies have long fostered an animosity toward Microsoft because of its long history of bullying and squashing innovative startups. But that’s ancient history now, as antitrust probes have weakened Microsoft and the cloud has made its core products more peripheral. Beating up on Microsoft used to be a matter of survival in Silicon Valley. Now it’s just an exercise in spite.

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Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Inbrics Android MID with QWERTY Slider Coming to CES jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  37 Comments
Tags: chrome os, google, Microsoft