TechStocker

Jerry Yang You Ingrate

Right now, Jerry Yang should be taking Carl Icahn out to the finest meal The French Laundry can offer. At the very least, Yang should add Icahn to his holiday wishe list as Icahn has done something that Yang hasn't been able to do for the last three years – make Yahoo! relevant in daily conversations. No longer do the Yahoo! beat reporters have to beg the company's under utilized PR people for interesting stories aside from the uninspiring advertising deals they regularly announce.

Icahn has saved Yahoo! from being a 90's trivia question (Who was the king of Internet search before Google?). And while the most practical application to today's users, My Yahoo!, has been replicated and surpassed by Pageflakes and Netvibes, will this new found Interest in the 90's stalwart save the company from an agonizingly slow descent back into obscurity ?

We at Techstocker think Yahoo! will remain a fixture in the headlines of business pages across the country and is a good short term investment for two simple reasons:

1. Carl Icahn didn't invest approximately $1.5b in Yahoo! stock on a whim. Icahn saw an opportunity to make a quick return on his cash and he's not about to let that go. The letters going back and forth are just the opening volley in a war that Yahoo! does not have the ammunition to fight.

2. Yahoo! desperately needs this deal. While Yang would like everyone to believe everything is smooth sailing on the S.S. Yahoo!, the reality is the company has been sailing aimlessly for a few years and will probably never return to a profitable port.

Lighten the load on your financial services stocks and place a small wager on Yahoo! It will return to its 52-week high which should net everyone, including Icahn and Yang, a nice little profit in these uncertain times. While it may leave Yang a little embarrassed, at least the improved valuation of his company stock will allow him to do some retail therapy.

VP of Business Development For Chico Online Advertising Startup Travidia

We had expected to encounter some flower children given Chico's reputation but Travidia's management team seems fairly buttoned down. The company is working with newspaper to help them to stay in business so a BD person who knows old media would be a good fit.

Submit their resume to commercial_jobs@travidia.com

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Description

TRAVIDIA, the leader in Internet publishing and ad distribution services for advertisers throughout North America, is currently seeking a VP of Business Development. This is an excellent opportunity to join a dynamic and growing company launching a new leading edge internet product.

The Business Development VP will be responsible for planning and achieving all aspects of the Bamboo AdNetwork sales and value-added partner strategies, initiatives and results.

Essential Functions:
Lead and direct a team of business development professionals and actively manage revenue generation and sales process across Bamboo AdNetwork.

Market identification, analysis, competitive intelligence, business modeling, engagement, and implementation.

Coordinating product development to address new business opportunities.

Develop and closely manage strategic relationships with partners to maximize and
leverage distribution and revenue opportunities.

Develop client communication, marketing and retention strategy and processes.

Develops business forecasts, financial budgets and targets.

Requirements:
Coach/player role that requires the ability to selectively identify and create revenue-generating customers and partnership opportunities in a rapidly changing market with many players.

Professional business development or corporate development experience within the Internet Media or Technology sectors.

Knowledge and experience in online and off-line media advertising and internet technology.

Proven leadership, management and team building skills.

Ability to analyze and act on external market trends and help drive direction of product development.

Excellent sales and negotiation skills and experience in negotiating strong revenue generating contracts.

Ability to handle projects of sensitive or urgent nature in a professional and timely manner.

With Microsoft Buying Chunk of CareerBuilder, Monster.com Is Single

MSFT this week bought 4% of newspaper owned Careerbuilder. UBS says that this makes Monster.com a strategic buyout interest as one of the few large remaining career sites. Potential suitors are Gannett and eBay.

Visual Sciences (aka WebSideStory) Pulls Out A Hockey Stick

Not only did Visual Sciences (VSCN) complete its rebranding from WebSideStory but it killed its quarter and the stock piled up 28%.The company earned $3.3M, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $20.7M. Analysts expected earnings of 14 cents a share.

Wall Street Divorces The Knot

Shares in The Knot (KNOT) plunged 14% as the wedding site screwed its quarterly numbers. The company earned $1.6M, or 5 cents a share, on revenue of $21M. Analysts expected earnings of 8 cents a share on revenue of $23.4M.

We view The Knot's problems as similar to those of Planet Out. They are both niche sites dependent on key advertisers where expectations are too high to hit. Perhaps both of these companies should be privatized.

Radio Shack Up On Turnaround Start + Buyout Rumors

We haven't been to a RadioShack (RSH) for a while. We always hated it, but appreciate its turnaround. Its ads are much better and its Web site works fine. There has been a lot of chatter on CNBC about the stock, with one analyst saying he likes it that people have hated RadioShack for so long, that makes it sill a good value.

Businessweek recently fueled rumors that Dell might buy the company, so the stock has been up on that story. Credit Suisse advises investors to be more cautious on the turnaround as its still in the early stages and may crap out in the end. But Credit Suisse does buy the takeover rumors.

BEA Up As Another Takover Candidate

M&A groups at the investment banks must be burning the midnight oil. It seems that so many stock movements these weeks are caused less by performance than rumors of takeovers.

Today an analyst at Citigroup speculates that a shares spike at BEA was caused by rumors that HP might be BEA. It would be a big gulp for HP as BEA has a market cap of $4.7B. Given HP's turmoil over the past year we expect this is too big a deal for HP to muster right now.

24/7 Media Hires Lehman To Pimp Its Biz

24/7 Media ad hired Lehman Brothers as a financial adviser to assess strategic alternatives. Shares have been way since the acquisitions of DoubleClick by Google and Right Media by Yahoo. The NY Post has reported that 24/7 could be a target of WPP Group or Microsoft.

Jefferies & Co. consider the possibility of a Microsoft deal diminished by recently weak quarterly results at 24/7. Microsoft doesn't want to be seen as buying a lagging performer. And MSFT has ongoing talks on potential alliances between Microsoft and Yahoo.

Life Not Gay At PlanetOut. Will Run Out of Cash In 2007

PlanetOut (LGBT) fell in a sink whole. Given how well other online media companies are doing, we have ti think that the company is just poorly run and perhaps should not be a public company. PlanetOut runs web sites, magazines and travel services for the gay and lesbian market, reported a worse first quarter that it had warned. Revenue for the quarter was $16.8M, which is fine but the company’s adjusted EBITDA of -$3.6M was worse than feared due to continued weakness across its lines of business.

CEO Karen Magee said will take 12-24 months to turn the company around, and noted that the company’s balance sheet is “very weak.” She said the company will require a investor very soon. Smartly, PlanetOut has has hired Allen & Co. as a strategic adviser.

Analyst Give Murdoch 40% Chance of Landing Dow Jones

UBS says there remains a 40% probability that News Corp. (NWS) succeeds in its offer to buy Dow Jones. There is only a 10% chance that another suitor emerges, given the high price offered by News Corp., UBS asserts.

Lean Mean Fighting Machine Cisco Not Mean Enough

Cisco did well this quarter but is not optimistic enough so Wall Street pulled the plug on the stock, which lost about 6%. Reading through a variety of analyst report it seems that Cisco is just to complex for mortals to peg each quarter. Some product lines are nailing it, others need a quarter or two. Some think its a growth stock and want to value it that way, others disagree. Cisco is not a company to get emotional about.

Microsoft's 1-2 Punch

From our vantage point, it seems that the Microsoft hive is angry and buzzing. Bill Gates told a MSN conference that he is going to be all over content and advertising. Meanwhile his buddy Ballmer was speaking at the Software 2007 conference in Santa Clara says he is taking on Office Business Applications, or software that sits in between MSFT office and enterprise systems. We figure each of these guys can cut throught the political BS to make things happen in both camps.

JP Morgan Says Google Should Buy Yahoo

J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan, needs to cut down on the late night partying with think. He suggests today that “it would now make sense” for Google to buy Yahoo and thinks there would not be regulatory issues. We won't argue with his financial analysis that if Yahoo would use Google's ad server instead of Panama it would make a lot more.

Goldman: Buy Cisco Before It Reports

Goldman Sachs thinks that Cisco is going to be expectations for the quarter ending in April and advises buyers to strike now.

Buy Sandsisk: Report Says 1/2 of Laptops To Use Flash Memory

Forward looking market research firms are often wrong, but if a new rport from iSuppli proves correct, we would be smart to buy flash memory maker SanDisk (SNDK) and sell drive makers Seagate (STX) and Western Digital (WDC).

iSuppli find that more than half of new notebook PCs will use some form of flash-memory based hard drives by the end of 2009.

The firms forsees that 24M notebooks with flash storage selling by the last quarter of2009, compared to just 143K in the first quarter of 2007.