Rolling up an Online Ad Agency Powerhouse: AKQA CEO Tom Bedecarre (Part 4)

AKQA is a company that was built largely during the Dotcom crash era. SM: Of the firms you talked to, who ultimately made the investment? You were doing an ad agency roll-up, right? TB: Francisco Partners made an investment in our business which was a hybrid online / offline venture at that point. We acquired

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Palm: Stop Missing Obvious Opportunities

I spent a chunk of my professional career working on turnarounds. Thus, I always find it interesting to look at companies which are in turnaround situations. Palm, obviously, is. What’s incredible to me is how Palm keeps missing opportunities to provide real value to its customers. Take the example of 2 services that have become

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Palm Gets Rubinstein

Elevation Partners is buying 25% of Palm for $325 Million, and John Rubinstein, the now famous Apple executive who brought the iPod to life, and ran Apple’s iPod division until recently, will join as Executive Chairman. The deal also brings Elevation founders Roger McNamee and Fred Anderson (former CFO of Apple) onto the Board of

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Palm’s Fate

With the mobile world awaiting the arrival of the iPhone, which I believe is positioned as a laptop replacement convergence device, Palm has just released its own laptop replacement product. Key points of the Foleo: [With my comments] * Positioning : ProSumer Mobile Companion, that works with a smartphone and keeps it synched. [Not a

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Turn Logic into Magic (7)

By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author A strong brand generates strong differentiation, attentive and loyal customers, and proud employees. It incents creative people with the best ideas, products and services outside the company, to come team up with the strong brand and help them continue to leapfrog competitors. Strong brands tend to know what they are

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iPhone and What’s Coming: Synthesis

Over the last few weeks, we discussed a number of iPhone related issues that are key blocks challenging the rest of the eco-system today. Here is a quick synthesis of the key nuggets: (1) It’s positioning as a laptop replacement device, which I believe will force most of the other laptop and cellular handset vendors

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iPhone and the Future of Microsoft

This is a very strange perspective, but I think in the mobile world, the iPhone is actually driving the market towards Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, and away from the current OS leader Symbian. Let’s go through the logic step by step.

iPhone and the Future of Palm

I have already written a few pieces on Palm over the last 2 years: Before the iPhone was announced: * PALM to the boonies * PalmPod After the iPhone was announced: * Palm’s Turnaround Formula * Should Dell Acquire Palm? * Palm Changing Hands? In the context of our more recent discussion about how the

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