Resurrection of the Living Deads

There have been a few deals this year that make a lot of sense for the shareholders, but make very little sense for the acquiring private equity firm, despite the discounts: Broadvision’s acquisition by Vector Capital is one such. The second one is Golden Gate Capital’s acquisition of Blue Martini, presumably to merge with Ecometry, one of their other portfolio companies.

Professor Calculus triggers an LBO?

Need Help With Calculus? Tutors Coach U.S. Students Online — From India is an article from the Wall Street Journal. Tanu Basu lives in Boston, but when she wants extra coaching in math, the 16-year-old American gets online and spends an hour reviewing calculus with an Indian teacher who is based in a suburb of

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Tech Buy-Out: Skill gap analysis

Rumbles can be heard on both sides of the business today, as both the VCs and the Buy-out guys are waking up to the potential of tech Buy-outs. The larger venture funds are trying to figure out LBO methods, while the Buy-out guys are assessing how to bring strategic leverage into their portfolios.

Pixar: Animation = ?: Online Shopping

The online world has changed in the last ten years from a basic user experience to a vastly more involved and integrated user experience. And yet, the online shopping experience is still fairly basic, elementary, and non-experiential. Beyond the basics, however, today’s experiential shopping opportunity online has become many times richer and more attractive. Broadband has become ubiquitous. Publishing tools are orders of magnitude more sophisticated, easy, and accessible, and visual merchandising needs to correspondingly evolve to the next level.

India, Inc.: Wake up!

What the Chinese are doing is doing leveraged buy-outs on big, fat, powerful American brands reeling under margin pressures, and applying what they do really well: low-cost manufacturing to shave the fat off, while at the same time gaining access to brand power and distribution channels. This leads me to wonder how long India, Inc. will remain asleep at the wheels?

P-A-L-M to the boonies?

Wall Street Journal reports that the two Palms are showing signs of wanting to getting back together. “PalmOne Inc. said it is acquiring full rights to the “Palm” brand name and will change its name to Palm Inc. later this year. Milpitas, Calif.-based PalmOne also said Tuesday that it has renewed its license of the

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Netflix, look elsewhere!

Netflix and Walmart have decided to partner, turning over all of 100,000 Walmart DVD rental customers to Netflix. Not bad, but probably, also, not great! This is a good block and tackle strategy for Netflix, and it IS good news that at least one of the competitors becomes an ally. But the threats of the

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Oh, and here’s a lead …

For VCs looking for strong product company models, my suggestion is, make a trip to Calcutta (now called Kolkata), the erstwhile capital city of British India, and meet Arvind Agarwal.