A handful of tech bellwethers have already delivered their results for the latest quarter, and if last […]

Yahoo, with its shares currently trading at $21, could be worth as much as $36 if broken up, with its Asian investments spun off and Google or Microsoft taking over its search traffic. [Breakingviews.com via Paul Kedrosky]

Word now comes that Liberty, former cable baron John Malone’s company, has opportunistically paid $340 million for 14 million shares in Barry Diller’s IAC, raising its stake to 30 percent. IAC, too, repurchased 6 million shares at the same time. That means that Diller must have begrudgingly consented to the sale; at the same time, he reached an agreement that prevented Malone from taking a bigger stake in the online conglomerate. But who was the seller?

An obvious guess: Bill Miller, Legg Mason’s chief investment officer, is a famed tech investor, most noted for making an early bet on Amazon.com. But as a stock pick, IAC, has been a stinker, dropping 38 percent over the past year. And Legg Mason is one of only two institutional investors who could have easily parted with 20 million shares. (Lord Abbett, another mutual-fund company, is the only other.)

Miller has been unwinding his stake since March, so a sale would not be surprising. But it’s a blow to Diller nonetheless. The media mogul has sought to boost his company’s shares by splitting it into five more focused parts, targeting specific sectors of e-commerce. Shareholders would then choose which ones they want to invest in. Whoever sold that large stake to Liberty, whether Miller or anyone else, has signalled an obvious choice: none of the above.

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Source:Valleywag

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron’s spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller’s IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has “few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S.” What does that mean?

It means that Diller, who prides himself on spreading his bets, has done a bad job. The company’s diversification into all fields of Internet business has proven a weakness rather than a strength — a fact even Diller now recognizes. That’s why he’s breaking the company up into bits, leaving an IAC that’s focused on online content and advertising. The remainder, however, will still be too vulnerable to the U.S. economy.

Bezos, meanwhile, has proved the opposite of Diller. He’s made one bet and stuck to it. And while e-commerce is no longer sexy on Sand Hill Road or on Wall Street, it continues to be a growth industry. The longer users have been on the Web, the more they tend to shop online.

His lone divagation from e-commerce — Amazon’s panoply of Web services, popular with gullible startups — is an exercise in renting out a computing infrastructure he’s built at great expense. It’s unlikely to be a better business than e-commerce, but it scores Bezos valuable press at little cost.

Mahaney’s stock analysis is not a shocker: The stock market undervalues persistence and overvalues change for change’s sake. What’s surprising is that so few people have taken this insight to the bank.

FedEx was hit with a $319 million tax bill over the job classification of FedEx ground employees. A number of lawsuits have been filed by FedEx ground drivers who believed the company was responsible for their taxes; FedEx maintained that they were independent contractors. That’s not the interesting part, though. FedEx, in a tried and true public relations move, “took out the trash” and released the bad news late Friday on a holiday weekend. The earliest story we could find on the IRS charge was released at 6:34 pm Eastern, well beyond when most people were reading news stories. Very clever, FedEx. (Photo by Brosner)

Source:Valleywag

In 2007, online holiday shopping as rose 20 percent over last year. And “Green Monday” — the day on which e-commerce sales peaked at $881 million, beat out “Cyber Monday” and “Black Friday” for most ridiculous made-up holiday shopping day. Cyber Monday spending came in at $734 million and Black Friday didn’t even make comScore’s top ten list. Neither day was available for comment.

Source:Valleywag

With light trading volume because of the holiday, Apple stock hit an all-time high today, closing at $198.80. The company now has a market cap of $174 billion, and has risen 134.32 percent on the year. Apple is now worth about as much as networking giant Cisco. Shareholders are likely reactiong to predictions strong holiday sales for the company, plus possible introductions of new products at the Macworld Expo in January.

Google is cracking down on copyright-infringing videos uploaded to its site. Sort of. Click through to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire ” on YouTube and you’ll see a yellow box which reads, “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.” This is bad news for Songza, the Web jukebox which rips the audio track from YouTube videos.

If there’s no audio track to rip, Songza will go silent. But after so many obnoxious parodies using BIlly Joel’s song in the past few weeks, we’re not so sure that, in this particular instance, Google’s ban isn’t actually good news for the rest of us.

Source:Valleywag

Larry Ellison’s likely too busy counting all the money he made today to ask this question, but we will: Why did NetSuite’s shares rocket upwards in the final hours of trading today? The company went public with a Dutch auction, a process meant to get the best and fairest price for the company shares. This morning, it seemed like it had gone off flawlessly: The stock opened at $26, the auction-set price, and traded near there all morning. Then it suddenly raced upwards to close at $35.50, making the whole company worth $2.1 billion, and Ellison’s stake $1.3 billion.

One theory: Avaricious day traders, hoping that the stock might drop from its IPO price, may have sold it short. As the price slowly rose, they would have found themselves losing money, a position known as a “short squeeze.” To get out, they’d have to buy shares of a thinly traded stock, in a rising market — a formula guaranteed to push shares sky-high. Note that NetSuite only sold 6.2 million shared on the market, but 15.9 million shares changed hands today. That’s a lot of buying and selling. Any other theories? Let me know.

Is Yahoo censoring hot gossip about its Hollywood ex-boss’s family? Page Six and other LA gossip rags tell us Lindsay Lohan’s lastest BFF with benefits might be none other than Courtenay Semel. That’s right, former Yahoo topper Terry Semel’s daughter. Reportedly, the pair were seen together at a housewarming party with LA “power lesbian” Jeanette Longoria.

Proximity to lesbians is big news in celebrity gossip world, but for some reason we can’t find the story on Yahoo’s rag, OMG, which Yahoo executive Scott Moore recently took under his wing. What gives, Scott? We thought you were a “news guy.” Or are you suddenly tired of seeing awkward relationships exposed on gossip blogs?

Source:Valleywag
Today’s most popular headlines are Perez Hilton banned from YouTube (5,019 views today), Google CEO on the new workplace: Check out the broads! (1,191) and The fatal misstep that got Perez Hilton banned (1,178). Today’s most discussed stories are Perez Hilton banned from YouTube (19 comments), The fatal misstep that got Perez Hilton banned (13) and I’m an idiot. Someone please explain “Attribution” to me (12).

Source:Valleywag

NetSuite, the online business-software company based in San Mateo, has priced its IPO, selling 6.2 million shares at $26 a share to raise $161 million. Its first trading day may not see a big pop, however, as the company has warned: Its auction-based offering sets the price, in theory, at what the market will bear. Conventional IPOs are typically underpriced, allowing for more of a rise. NetSuite has already seen a boost: Expectations were for an IPO in the $16 to $19 range. [Reuters]

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