A new startup called Project Slice wants to make all those receipts in your email inbox genuinely useful. Similar to what Mint does for your personal finances, what TripIt does for your travel plans, and what services like Manilla do for your bills, the Palo Alto, Calif. company aims to make it easier to actually see all of your purchase information in one place, rather than struggling to find it on the right website or email.

Project Slice offers the service through both an embedded application in Yahoo Mail (which should help the company get in front of lots of eyeballs quickly) and through its own Slice Web application, which is currently invite-only beta testing. So the company says users will be able to easily track shipping, bring up a merchant’s customer service and return information, and see all of their purchases — not just the store where they made the purchase, but what they actually bought.

Slice can also aggregate all of your online purchase history with specific businesses, including popular retailers like Amazon.com and daily deals sites, like Groupon. The company says the service is powered by a “sophisticated semantic parsing infrastructure that enables us to extract and organize item level purchase information from multiple merchants and receipt formats.”

Project Slice also announced that it has raised $9.4 million from DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Floodgate (the fund from Digg and Twitter investor Mike Maples), Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, and Rick Thompson.

Companies: DCM, Floodgate, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Project Slice

People: Eric Schmidt, Michael Birch, Mike Maples, Rick Thompson

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

“I think I have all of the qualifications to run the institution. I have 30 years of public service. I have a PHD from the University of Chicago. I have worked all my life in matters relevant for the Fund. I was the Executive Director of the Fund, the Deputy Managing Director of the Fund, in charge of the relationship with 80 countries. I was Minister of Finance of Mexico and now I am the Governor of the central bank. I have wide experience, I have participated in the G20, part of the steering committee of the Financial Stability Board, I’m a board member of the Bank for International Settlements. I know the institution from all different angles. I know the Fund as a member of the staff and its management, I was an Executive Director and I know the Fund, having been in authority with a lot stake at the Fund. I think I make a good candidate.” And despite all that…

Nothing about how he would react in a scenario wherein he was surrounded by hotel maids and “no one would find out,” i.e. this resume is going directly to the trash.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Shares of Barnes & Noble (BKS) are higher by 41 cents, or 2%, at $19 after the company this morning announced a new version of its “Nook” e-book reader that uses e-ink technology, the same technology used in Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle, and in the first version of the Nook, but this time with the ability to respond to the touch of a finger, eschewing the hardware buttons that had been used in previous models.

The $139 device is expected to ship on June 10th.

This latest Nook is black and white, unlike the color touchscreen LCD-based Nook unveiled last year.

B&N’s announcement follows a similar offering yesterday by Kobo, a private company that offers the “Kobo eReader Touch,” for $129. The Kobo device is also expected to ship in June. Kobo is tied in to e-book offerings from Borders Group (BGP), which is in bankruptcy, and the Canadian chain Indigo.

Both devices feature WiFi, and both are available for pre-order.

Of course, Barnes & Noble is the subject of a buyout offer from Liberty Media’s Liberty Capital (LCAPA) unit, for $17 a share, announced last Friday. And the Associated Press’s Mae Anderson this morning offers an update on that offer.

During a shareholder meeting yesterday, Liberty’s chairman John Malone said he wouldn’t shut all of Barnes’s retail stores, if the deal were to go through, and that he imagined “a physical presence for a long, long time to come,” as a profitable enterprise.

Amazon, meanwhile, is expected to add to its offerings with two fully-fledged tablet computers later this year, as I wrote yesterday.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Strauss-Kahn’s pals bid to pay off woman’s kin (NYP)
Friends of alleged hotel sex fiend Dominique Strauss-Kahn secretly contacted the accusing maid’s impoverished family, offering them money to make the case go away since they can’t reach her in protective custody, The Post has learned.

JPMorgan, UBS, Deutsche Bank to Face N.Y. Probe (Bloomberg)
JPMorgan Chase & Co., UBS AG and Deutsche Bank AG are being investigated as part of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s expanded probe of mortgage securitization, according to a person familiar with the matter. Four bond insurers also were subpoenaed: Ambac Financial Group Inc., MBIA Inc., Syncora Holdings Ltd. and Assured Guaranty Ltd., according to the person, who couldn’t be identified because the probe isn’t public.

Moody’s warns 14 UK banks face downgrade (Telegraph)
“The reassessment is not driven by either a deterioration in the financial strength of the banking system or that of the government,” said Elisabeth Rudman, a Moody’s senior credit officer and lead analyst for a number of UK banks, on Tuesday. “It has been initiated in response to ongoing guidance from the UK authorities (the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury) that banks that fail in the future should not expect capital injections from the public purse.”

Greek default could make others junk: Moody’s (Reuters)
Portugal and Ireland would be at risk of multi-notch credit downgrades, pushing their ratings into junk territory in the event of a default by Greece, Moody’s EMEA chief credit officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

French government says China backs Lagarde for IMF head (Reuters)
French Budget Minister and government spokesman Francois Baroin said on Tuesday that China supports Finance Minister Christine Lagarde as candidate to be the new head of the International Monetary Fund.

Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bullish on Commodities, Predict 20% Return on Oil (Bloomberg)
Goldman…boosted its 12- month prediction for Brent crude to $130 a barrel from $107, analysts led by Jeffrey Currie said in a report today. Morgan Stanley raised its Brent estimate by 20 percent to average $120 a barrel this year and by 24 percent to $130 in 2012, it said.

Steven Rattner: Valley’s euphoria is tech bubble version 1.5 (FT)
“Yet, just as Facebook and Google are viewed today as bullet-proof franchises, so was AOL viewed as impregnable in its day. Its more than 20m customers paid $19.95 a month in steadily recurring revenue for, among other things, early versions of e-mail, chat and networking. With the advent of the worldwide web, those subscribers were essentially paying for nothing more than slow-speed dial-up connections. As broadband access spread, the customers melted away. Today, AOL has a trading value of only $2bn.”

Morgan Stanley In Talks to Fund More Asian Hedge Funds Start-Ups This Year (Bloomberg)
The New York-based bank is helping negotiate several opportunities for investors to give money to new hedge funds for a share of their fee revenue and deals in which they will provide capital to expand assets across Asia, said Hugh Abdullah, its Hong Kong-based head of capital introductions in the region.

Goldman Sachs cuts China, Asia growth forecasts (MarketWatch)
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on Tuesday cut its growth forecast for China and predicted inflation will accelerate, citing the impact of higher oil prices and supply-side constraints on the world’s second-largest economy. In addition the bank lowered its outlook for the Asia region, excluding Japan.

SEC Deepens Probe of Forex Trading (WSJ)
At issue is whether “custody” banks—which handle securities and back-office tasks for institutional investors—are overcharging public pension funds for trading in the $4 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market…A whistleblower group led by investor Harry Markopolos has sued BNY Mellon in Virginia and Florida, and rival State Street in California, accusing them of improperly pricing currency trades for state and local pension funds.

Feds diss banks’ lowball $5B offer (NYP)
State attorneys general and federal agencies found an offer of $5 billion from five banks “woefully inadequate,” according to a person familiar with the talks. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup , Wells Fargo and Ally Financial made that offer two weeks ago. The amount was a far cry from the $20 billion the states and federal agencies had been discussing, although not formally proposing.

Call for Lehman creditors to reveal positions (FT)
A group of hedge funds and pension funds opposing the Lehman estate’s bankruptcy plan has asked the court to force many Lehman Brothers creditors – including banks such as Goldman Sachs – to reveal their current holdings of the defunct investment bank’s debts. The so-called Ad Hoc group of creditors, which includes hedge fund Paulson & Co, bond fund Pimco, and the Calpers retirement fund, were themselves compelled by the court, at the behest of Lehman, to disclose their holdings in March after they filed their own plan of organisation.

Goldman Finding Third Time a Charm in Russia (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is making a third attempt in 17 years to crack the Russian market, this time by leveraging a $1 billion private-equity bet to win deals and wooing the Kremlin for roles in asset sales.

Volcanic Ash Forces Flight Cancellations in Europe (NYT)
“About 250 flights have already been canceled, mostly over Scotland” Kyla Evans, a spokeswoman for Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, said. “We would expect up to 500 flights to be canceled today. But it would very much depend on how the ash cloud moves, it could be many more or less.”

Radio host says Rapture actually coming in October (AP via USA Today)
[California preacher Harold] Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before the Earth was destroyed, said he felt so terrible when his doomsday prediction did not come true that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. His independent ministry, Family Radio International, spent millions — some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message. But Camping said that he’s now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

$$$ Spain and Italy Turn Against Greece Over Reform Efforts (NYT)

$$$ Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the New York hotel maid, “Don’t you know who I am! Don’t you know who I am?” while pinning her down during the alleged sexual assault, law enforcement sources close to the investigation told FoxNews.com…“Please stop. I need my job, I can’t lose my job, don’t do this. I will lose my job. Please, please stop! Please stop!” she told Strauss-Kahn, according to law enforcement sources. Strauss-Kahn allegedly responded: “No, baby. Don’t worry, you’re not going to lose your job. Please, baby, don’t worry,” Strauss-Kahn responded, according to investigators. (Fox)

$$$ Belgium’s Debt Outlook Revised to Negative by Fitch on Political Stalemate (Bloomberg)

$$$ ‘Fear Gauge‘ Tops 20 for First Time in Two Months (WSJ)

$$$ How An Inquiry Of Goldman Might Play Out (Dealbook)

$$$ LinkedIn site has security vulnerabilities-expert (Reuters via Easy Street/Heidi Moore)

$$$ David Stockman: “The real problem is the de facto policy of both parties is default. When the Republicans say no tax increases, they’re saying we want the U.S. government to default. Because there isn’t enough political will in this country to solve the problem even halfway on spending cuts. When the Democrats say you can’t touch Social Security, when you have Obama sponsoring a war budget for defense that is even bigger than Bush, then I say the policy of the White House is default as well.” (YouTube)

$$$ AIG Underwriters Signal Deal May Price at Close to $30 (CNBC)

$$$ Walker: US Worse Off Financially Than Euro Nations (CNBC)

$$$ Greece to start selling domestic assets to ease debts (BBC)

$$$ More banks targeted in US probe (FT)

$$$ Carlyle Returns Record $6.4 Billion in First Quarter on Strong Dealmaking (Bloomberg)

$$$ Former Fed Monetary Chief Madigan Hired by Barclays Capital (Bloomberg)

$$$ Steven Cohen wants a five-year-old stock manipulation lawsuit filed by Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings to go away. (Reuters/Unstructured Finance)

$$$ Hintz Says Smith Barney Is ‘Checkmated’ by Krawcheck, McCann (Bloomberg)

$$$ China’s Buffett plays the long game (FT)

$$$ Senate Banking chair Tim Johnson discusses hedge funds [AR]

$$$ IBM passes Microsoft’s market cap after 15 years (Reuters)

$$$ Lady Gaga Breaks Amazon (MarketBeat)

$$$ Barack Obama’s car, nicknamed ‘the beast‘, gets stuck (BBC)

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Shares of LinkedIn, a social network for business professionals, ended their debut on the New York Stock Exchange up 109 percent at $94.25 as the first high-profile Web 2.0 initial public offering made a huge splash in public trading.

It’s a sign of the excitement around social networking and its promise, although the results were enough for some people to say it was part of a ridiculous bubble.

That means LinkedIn now has a market cap of around $9 billion — well above the valuation of $4 billion it claimed when it priced the shares of its initial public offering between $42 and $45. Shares of LinkedIn traded as high as $122 earlier today, giving the company an implied valuation as high as $11 billion. LinkedIn’s valuation is the first official record of the hyper-valuations many Web 2.0 companies like Twitter and Facebook have seen in recent years.

LinkedIn’s shares hovered at around $103 for most of the afternoon before finally dipping down below that level of support toward the end of daytime trading. The company also saw a quick decline in its share prices in the ten minutes before the markets closed, dropping as low as $91 before leveling off at around $94 minutes before the final bell. The shares were trading at $94.24 most recently in extended trading.

The company’s stunning debut on the stock market could end up creating additional chatter about whether several Web 2.0 companies are overvalued. LinkedIn’s closing share price and valuation mean the company is worth somewhere north of 36 times its revenue for 2010, which was around $243 million. There’s also the chance that share prices of LinkedIn could turn south over the next several days, like shares of Chinese social networking company RenRen. That company turned out to be a flop on public trading markets and has fallen below the IPO price of $14 to $13.75 it saw earlier this month.

A number of highly successful Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Zynga — and LinkedIn — have seen ballooning valuations as investors have rushed to snatch up as many shares as possible ahead of what could be some of the most high-profile tech IPOs to date. Facebook, for example, was valued at $50 billion after its most recent round of funding — though it is trading at a higher price than that on secondary markets.

LinkedIn is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has more than 1,000 employees. The company, founded by Reid Hoffman (pictured above), is a business network that’s designed to help professionals connect with other potential business contacts and get a “warm introduction” through people in their network.

Tags: initial public offering, internet bubble, IPO, social networking, valuation

Companies: linkedin, RenRen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

I.M.F. Chief Quits in Wake of Charges of Sexual Attack (NYT)
“It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the Executive Board my resignation from my post of managing director of the I.M.F.,” he said in a statement dated Wednesday and released early Thursday by the I.M.F. “I think at this time first of my wife — whom I love more than anything — of my children, of my family, of my friends.”

Most French People ‘Think DSK Was Set Up’ (Sky News)
The survey, taken before the 62-year-old’s first court appearance on Monday, showed that 57% of respondents believe the Socialist presidential hopeful has been set up.

Lagarde May Stake Claim as First Female IMF Chief (Bloomberg)
A lawyer who became the first female chairman of Chicago- based firm Baker & McKenzie LLP, Lagarde was appointed as finance minister by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, just before the onset of the financial crisis. Lagarde’s negotiating abilities helped clinch agreement on the euro area’s sovereign bailout fund announced in the early hours of May 10 last year, according to a person who was there…A fluent speaker of English, Lagarde attended a year of high school as an exchange student at Holton Arms, a private girls’ school in Bethesda, Maryland. An avid swimmer, young Christine was selected for the French national synchronized swim team when she was 15 and competed internationally for two years.

J.P. Morgan, Fund Investors Rebut Meredith Whitney (MarketBeat)
J.P. Morgan Asset Management chucked a note over the transom in response to Meredith Whitney’s latest hate letter to the muni market.Their take is that Ms. Whitney makes some points they sort of agree with, but that she seriously overstates the default risk.

Levin sees ‘real hope’ of fresh Goldman probe (FT)
The senator said Goldman’s payment of $550m to settle fraud allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the marketing of one structured debt product did not preclude other allegations. He said Goldman executives misled his committee but suggested they might have stopped short of lies with “wiggle words”. “They obviously spent a lot of time parsing words,” he said, adding he was “not going to judge whether they committed perjury”. He said even large settlements were not satisfactory without admissions of guilt.

Goldman Sachs Back at No. 1 (Deal Journal)
According to figures from Dealogic, Goldman popped to the No. 1 spot for the first time this year in the league tables, the closely watched listing of M&A advisers ranked by the value of deals on which they advise. J.P. Morgan had held the crown for global deal advisers since Jan. 18.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s two sons born days apart (CNN)
A son fathered by Arnold Schwarzenegger with his housekeeper was born less than a week after Maria Shriver gave birth to another Schwarzenegger son, according to birth records obtained Wednesday by CNN.

SEC probes electronic platform failures (FT)
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating computer system failures at electronic marketplaces including Nasdaq to determine whether internal controls are sufficient, according to people familiar with the matter. The investigation is being handled by the enforcement division’s market abuse unit and is part of a broader regulatory review of stock exchanges following last year’s “flash crash”, recent hacking attempts and trading glitches

Perella Weinberg to Fork Over $11.5 Million in Dreier Fraud (Deal Journal)
Under the deal, [Chapter 11 trustee Sheila M.] Gowan will drop a lawsuit in which she sought the return of $24.1 million in payments she says Perella Weinberg and an affiliated fund received on the approximately $60 million they spent on the promissory notes that Dreier was hawking to investors such as themselves.

Smith Barney Deal Still On (WSJ)
In its first-quarter report, Morgan Stanley posted a $655 million pretax loss related to the Mitsubishi joint venture. After reports surfaced about the loss, Mitsubishi agreed to convert $7.8 billion in preferred stock for 385 million shares of the company. That conversion boosted Morgan Stanley’s Tier 1 ratio and presumably will give it added capital for the planned buyout of Citigroup’s stake in the Smith Barney venture. Morgan Stanley can begin buying that stake next year under its agreement with Citi. Mr. Gorman said reports of Morgan Stanley asking Citi to alter the terms of that deal weren’t true.

Nominations Submitted for the SEC (WSJ)
The White House on Wednesday submitted to the Senate a pair of nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission, requesting a second term for Democrat Luis Aguilar and naming former SEC staffer Dan Gallagher Jr. for a Republican seat that is due to become vacant in June…The SEC is an independent federal agency with five commissioners.

LinkedIn prices IPO at $45 a share (MarketWatch)
LinkedIn had raised its IPO pricing range earlier this week to between $42 and $45 a share, from $32 to $35 a share — thanks to strong demand. The public offering is expected to raise roughly $217 million for the company.

Yen falls as Japan enters recession (FT)
Gross domestic product fell by an annualised 3.7 per cent in the first three months, after a revised fall of 3 per cent in last quarter of 2010. Analysts had expected the economy to contract by just 1.9 per cent. A further contraction is expected in the second quarter before the economy rebounds as reconstruction spending kicks in, although the Japanese economy has suffered more than a decade of low growth and weak consumer spending.

Obama imposes sanctions on Syrian leader, 6 aides (WaPo)
The Obama administration ramped up the pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday with economic sanctions that targeted his personal finances and linked him explicitly to human rights abuses in his government’s brutal, two-month-old crackdown on demonstrators. The sanctions, which named six other top Syrian officials, represented a significant escalation in the administration’s public criticism of the Assad regime, marking the first time the ruler was penalized for the ongoing clashes that have left more than 900 people dead and thousands in prison.

Zombie Apocalypse? The CDC Describes How To Be Prepared (HuffPo)
The U.S. government wants to make sure that in the event of a zombie invasion, you know what to do. That’s right. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shocked us all with their post on how to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. The CDC post, “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse,” came out Monday and has been gaining media traction since — the link has been down for much of the day, presumingly due to over-traffic.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Small-cap ($367 million) patent holder Mosaid Technologies, which is based in Kanata, Ontario, in Canada, this afternoon fired the latest salvo in an ongoing patent battle with Cisco Systems (CSCO), complaining to the U.S. International Trade Commission that Cisco infringed six of its patents on networking technology, including power-over-ethernet, DSL access points, and voice technology for cable modems.

Mosaid, whose shares trade on the Toronto stock exchange under the symbol “MSD,” requested that the ITC halt import of Cisco products to the U.S.

Last August, Mosaid said that Cisco had requested a declaratory judgment of non-infringement of its products in light of nine U.S. patents held by Mosaid and requested a jury trial. Mosaid, beginning in October of 2009, had sent notice to Cisco saying the company infringed some of Mosaid’s 300 patents on various networking technologies, and demanded  Cisco pay for a license.

Mosaid is also suing chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) in the Disctrict Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, accusing the company last month of infringing its patents on power management in integrated circuits. It sued Japanese memory chip maker Elpida Memory in the same jurisdiction a week ago, charging the company infringes its patent on “field effect transistors,” or FETs.

And Mosaid also has a mammoth suit down in Texas, in the Marshall division, filed in March, against numerous companies, including Intel (INTC), Dell (DELL), Research in Motion (RIMM), chip maker Marvell Technology Group (MRVL), and several others, charging them with infringing on six patents relating to wireless technology, in particular as it pertains to wireless area networking.

Mosaid has had some patent victories of late. In December of last year, it got IBM (IBM) to license its technology applicable to application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC).

The company’s fiscal Q2 report last November featured a 17% jump in revenue on the licensing of wireless patents.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Ticketing startup Eventbrite announced today that it has raised $50 million to finance its growing ambitions in the ticketing market.

The San Francisco company started out aiming for a different audience than existing ticketing giant Ticketmaster, offering an easy way for small event organizers to sell tickets. My most common usage of Eventbrite has been for tech conferences and meetups. But the company has turned its focus to larger events, and last summer it sold 60,000 tickets for a Black Eyed Peas concert — its largest event ever, according to The New York Times.

Eventbrite says that with the new funding, it will continue to aim for bigger events, build more analytics and social media tools, and invest in its mobile products. In addition to established companies like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite is competing with newer startups like Ticketfly.

More than 10 million people have attended events ticketed by Eventbrite, and it’s on-track to process nearly $500 million in ticket sales this year, the company says. The new round was led by Tiger Global Management and brings Eventbrite’s total funding to $79.5 million. Past investors include Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

[image via Flickr/Rhys's Piece Is]

Tags: ticketing

Companies: Eventbrite, Tiger Global Management

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

This is an account from Tristan Banon, who earlier this week said she intends to file a complaint against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

In the clip the blonde Miss Banon, 22 at the time of the incident, tells a group of well-known journalists and actors she had requested a chat with Mr Strauss-Kahn for a book of interviews with leading French figures about the “biggest mistake you ever made”. She arrived at a studio with little more than a bed in it. She said he had insisted on holding her hand during the interview, then her arm and then made advances to her. There was no independent confirmation of her allegations.

“It ended really badly. We ended up fighting. It finished really violently,” the clip shows her saying. “We fought on the floor. It wasn’t a case of a couple of slaps. I kicked him, he unhooked my bra, he tried to open my jeans,” she said. The politician acted, she said, like a “chimpanzee on heat”. “I said the word ‘rape’ to scare him but it didn’t seem to scare him much, which suggests he was used to it,” she said.

[Telegraph via BI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker