Twitter has finalized its acquisition of immensely popular third-party client TweetDeck, according to a report by CNN Money. The report says the deal is worth more than $40 million in a mix of a cash and stock.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch reported the first tidbits of the deal. TechCrunch initially cited a $40 million to $50 million range for the purchase, and if the CNN report holds up, TC’s first report will prove accurate.

Just last month UberMedia was supposedly in the process of buying Tweetdeck and had a 30-day exclusive to buy. But negotiations took too long, and that gave Twitter time to propose a better offer.

Tweetdeck is one of the most popular third-party client for Twitter users, with versions available for desktop, iPhone, iPad, and Android. It can display real-time tweets, direct messages, Facebook feeds, and more, all from the same interface.

Twitter says it wants to better control the user experience, and control of TweetDeck will certainly make that possible. Before this, Twitter bought iPhone client Tweetie and partnered directly with with photo-hoster TwitPic. The company is also encouraging external developers to focus on something other than straightforward Twitter clients.

The only downside to Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck will be the loss of an innovative, popular client pushing Twitter to add new features and come up with better ideas. On the upside, having Twitter and Tweetdeck on the same team could mean better and faster integration between service and client.

Companies: TweetDeck, Twitter

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Twitter has finalized its acquisition of immensely popular third-party client TweetDeck, according to a report by CNN Money. The report says the deal is worth more than $40 million in a mix of a cash and stock.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch reported the first tidbits of the deal. TechCrunch initially cited a $40 million to $50 million range for the purchase, and if the CNN report holds up, TC’s first report will prove accurate.

Just last month UberMedia was supposedly in the process of buying Tweetdeck and had a 30-day exclusive to buy. But negotiations took too long, and that gave Twitter time to propose a better offer.

Tweetdeck is one of the most popular third-party client for Twitter users, with versions available for desktop, iPhone, iPad, and Android. It can display real-time tweets, direct messages, Facebook feeds, and more, all from the same interface.

Twitter says it wants to better control the user experience, and control of TweetDeck will certainly make that possible. Before this, Twitter bought iPhone client Tweetie and partnered directly with with photo-hoster TwitPic. The company is also encouraging external developers to focus on something other than straightforward Twitter clients.

The only downside to Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck will be the loss of an innovative, popular client pushing Twitter to add new features and come up with better ideas. On the upside, having Twitter and Tweetdeck on the same team could mean better and faster integration between service and client.

Companies: TweetDeck, Twitter

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Twitter has finalized its acquisition of immensely popular third-party client TweetDeck, according to a report by CNN Money. The report says the deal is worth more than $40 million in a mix of a cash and stock.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch reported the first tidbits of the deal. TechCrunch initially cited a $40 million to $50 million range for the purchase, and if the CNN report holds up, TC’s first report will prove accurate.

Just last month UberMedia was supposedly in the process of buying Tweetdeck and had a 30-day exclusive to buy. But negotiations took too long, and that gave Twitter time to propose a better offer.

Tweetdeck is one of the most popular third-party client for Twitter users, with versions available for desktop, iPhone, iPad, and Android. It can display real-time tweets, direct messages, Facebook feeds, and more, all from the same interface.

Twitter says it wants to better control the user experience, and control of TweetDeck will certainly make that possible. Before this, Twitter bought iPhone client Tweetie and partnered directly with with photo-hoster TwitPic. The company is also encouraging external developers to focus on something other than straightforward Twitter clients.

The only downside to Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck will be the loss of an innovative, popular client pushing Twitter to add new features and come up with better ideas. On the upside, having Twitter and Tweetdeck on the same team could mean better and faster integration between service and client.

Companies: TweetDeck, Twitter

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

RBC Capital’s Amit Daryanani today raised his rating on NetApp (NTAP) to Outperform from Sector Perform, with a $70 price target, up from $55, writing that the company’s profit margin should expand with the $480 million purchase of storage equipment maker Engenio.

Engenio was a unit of chip maker LSI (LSI) that makes storage devices for video, scientific computing and other high-bandwidth applications.

NetApp said in early March it would buy the company, and just completed the deal on Monday. It’s now offering some new product using Engenio technology, the “E5400,” which will make use of the Engenio technology for things such as storing full-motion video in from satellites and unmanned vehicles used by the federal government.

Daryanani thinks the Engenio technology can expand NetApp’s addressable market by $5 billion to $20 billion by getting the company more into the storage-area-network (SAN) market, versus NetApp’s traditional network-attached-storage market.

“We believe Engenio’s block storage technology should lead NetApp to incremental, annual revenue of $1+ billion at its core margin structure within two-to-three years.”

He sees the deal leading NetApp more into direct confrontation with EMC (EMC) on that company’s home turf:

We believe the Engenio purchase is NetApp’s competitive response to EMC’s recent launch of a unified storage platform (VNX) and purchase of Isilon Systems, as EMC will utilize Isilon’s scale-out NAS architecture to compete against NetApp in higher-growth, NAS-focused workload environments while NetApp will utilize Engenio’s block SAN technology to compete against EMC in the much larger SAN market where NetApp has much lower market share than the NAS market (5% versus 32%).

Daryanani also thinks the deal is neutral to earnings in the fiscal first quarter ending in July, but could add a penny in the October quarter, five cents in January, and 5 cents in the fiscal fourth quarter ending April of 2012.

Hence, Daryanani lifted his fiscal year 2012 EPS estimate to $2.29, from a prior $2.26, on revenue of $6.83 billion, up from $6.56 billion previously. That would lead to Ebit margins of 18% by Q4, up from about 16% now, he observes.

NetApp shares today are down 30 cents, or half a percent, at $53.91, caught up in the broad market downdraft.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

But an athlete does not have to get an MBA to break into finance, said Zoia of Glocap. Athletes may appeal to banks and private equity firms, but they are hired more so for business development roles than for technical ones, said Zoia. “They’re not doing detailed financial models and really advising the nitty gritty of the deal structure,” said Zoia. [FINS]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

As I noted in the previous post, Seagate’s (STX) deal today to take over the disk-drive operations of Samsung (SSNLF) is brightening the economic outlook of the business for both Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), who will now split 90% or so of drive shipments, an effective duopoloy, with Toshiba’s (6502.JP) 10% share now seeming ever more vulnerable.

And the deal promises some resolution of the constant flash-vs.-disc debate that has raged.

Robert Cihra with Caris & Co. tells me in a phone call this afternoon that the importance of NAND was at the heart of this deal.

“I don’t think they would have paid as much as they did if it weren’t for their ability to secure NAND supply from Samsung,” says Cihra. In fact, the effect of this tie-up is to diminish a long-standing fear among investors that flash would push out traditional rotating magnetic drives completely.

“Flash or hard drive? The reality is that you can paint a picture where it’s both,” Cihra tells me today.

“Certainly flash grows faster than hard drives over the long term, but it actually plays a role within the roadmap of hard drives,” given that the two technologies can be combined in hybrid drives, something Seagate has long been “quite vocal” about, Cihra notes.

What does it do for the stocks? Being a cyclical business, drive maker stocks have long had low valuation multiples in the tech universe. Seagate shares currently fetch about 8.5 times fiscal 2012′s projected earnings.

Cihra doesn’t see the multiple expanding much, because the threat that flash will dissipate the value of Seagate and Western’s drive expertise will still be there to some extent, for the foreseeable future.

But the outlook for profitability should be higher. Analysts are expecting about $2 per share in earnings in Seagate’s fiscal year ending next June. But that will probably turn out better, Cihra thinks, given what will now be much better economics in the drive business.

Seagate management said this morning the Samsung deal should add to earnings within the first year following the closing.

And Toshiba? “They’ve been the lowest-value-add in the entire drive industry,” Cihra tells me, especially given that Toshiba mostly sells to the distribution channel, with little direct OEM business.

Toshiba doesn’t make its own discs or drive heads, he observes, putting them at a disadvantage to Seagate and Western.

“I think they should just shut it down,” Cihra says of Toshiba’s drive business. “But I’ve thought that for a decade now.”

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Dish Network landed the winning bid, valued at around $320 million, for Blockbuster its bankruptcy auction. The company actually expects to pay around $228 million in cash — after “certain adjustments” are made at the deal’s closing — for the rental chain, according to an announcement made this morning.

But don’t expect the deal to help Blockbuster’s remaining 1,700 beleaguered stores. Instead, Dish is likely aiming to take advantage of Blockbuster’s online video streaming service, disc-by-mail rentals and rental kiosks.

“Blockbuster will complement our existing video offerings while presenting cross-marketing and service extension opportunities for Dish Network,” Tom Cullen, executive vice president of sales, marketing and programing for Dish Network, told Reuters.

It’s unlikely that it would do so, but the smartest thing for Dish to do may be to rid itself of even more Blockbuster retail locations and focus on a wider proliferation of its kiosks, which compete directly with Redbox, as well as more on its video streaming service, which is available on multiple living room and mobile devices.

The purchase also opens the door for Dish to offer cross-promotion deals with its satellite TV and Blockbuster’s services. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dish ends up offering free Blockbuster streaming accounts and disc rentals to its subscribers as an added bonus. The combination of Dish and Blockbuster could attack Netflix — which doesn’t offer rental kiosks or traditional TV service — from multiple sides.

It’s also worth considering just how far Blockbuster has fallen. At its highest point, the company’s market cap sat at more than $5 billion in 2002. Now, Dish has managed to snag it for slightly more than two times what Netflix paid to stream Mad Men.

Dish’s bid still needs to be approved by federal bankruptcy court at a hearing on Thursday.

Tags: kiosks, video rentals, video streaming

Companies: Blockbuster, Dish Network

People: Tom Cullen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Shares of Texas Instruments (TXN) have been halted pending some sort of news. The stock closed down 12 cents, or 0.4%, at $34.11.

Update: TI said it will pay $25 per share in cash to purchase National Semiconductor (NSM) for a total of $6.5 billion. That’s a 78% premium to National’s closing price today of $14.07.

The deal combines the biggest analog chip maker, TI, with one of the largest competitors.

TI’s CEO, Rich Templeton, said the deal was, “about strength and growth,” adding that, “National has an excellent development team, and its products combined with our own can offer customers an analog portfolio of unmatched depth and breadth.

National CEO Don Macleod said the deal would benefit from TI’s “much greater scale in the marketplace,” and its “larger portfolio of products and its large global sales force.”

TI said it will continue to operate National’s manufacturing facilities in Maine, Scotland and Malaysia.

A conference call is scheduled for 5:30 pm, Eastern, which you can listen to on TI’s Web site.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Typically in families where their are children of the same sex, one of two dynamics exists. In scenario one, big brother (or sister) is the star, excelling at everything he or she does, making it impossible for the younger sibling to live up to the highly set bar. In scenario two, the younger sibling outpaces the older, making the first born feel like a fuck up for not having the same successes as junior. In the Rajaratnam family, the former was the case. Whereas Raj was married with a bunch of kids, little bro Rengan struggled to meet women, noting that it felt like “they’ve all gone away or someone snatched them up.” Whereas Raj ran a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, Rengan had a dinky little shop with assets under management barely hitting 200 million, seeded by his bro. And whereas Raj (allegedly) had some of the best insider trading skills on the Street, Rengan embarrassed himself trying to beat the press on hot tips.

The younger brother of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam called him in a panic in March 2008 after The Wall Street Journal published an article about a secret wireless venture the hedge-fund manager allegedly knew about from a confidential source at a company involved in the deal. In the call, which was caught on a federal wiretap and played Thursday at Raj Rajaratnam’s insider-trading trial in Manhattan, Rengan Rajaratnam appears to be frustrated that his ability to make trades ahead of the deal would be hampered now that it was public.

“Oh dude, we’re f—” Rengan Rajaratnam said, according to the tape played for jurors. “It just hit The Wall Street Journal.”

“What’s that?” Raj Rajaratnam asked.

“The Clearwire stuff,” his brother said.

Not saying living for so many years in Raj’s shadow finally caused Rengan to snap and rat him out, but not not saying it, either.

Galleon Jurors Hear Panicked Call From Rajaratnam Brother [WSJ]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Bloomberg’s Ronald Grover reports from the sidelines of a film conference in L.A. today that Netflix‘s (NFLX) chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, dismissed the threat of the deal announced Tuesday between Time-Warner (TWX) and Facebook to offer movie rentals and purchases.

“Nobody goes to Facebook to watch movies,” Sarandos is quoted by Grover as saying.

Netflix shares today are up $9.79, or 5%, at $202.78.

Previously: Netflix: A ‘Sell,’ Though Not A Short, Says Gabelli, March 9th, 2011.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily