Filed under: Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Initial public offerings, small business

As of last year, there were roughly 1.5 million nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the U.S., with about $1.6 trillion in aggregate revenues. Interestingly enough, about 83,000 NPOs reported $1 million or more in revenues.

What’s more, a growing share of revenues is coming from online giving. The amount was nearly $7 billion last year. One of the firms that’s capitalizing on the trend is Convio. And the company has recently filed to go public.

Convio develops on-demand software that helps NPOs with fund raising, advocacy, e-mail marketing, and web content management. There are about 1,200 clients, such as the American Red Cross, American Cancer Society, CARE, Public Broadcasting Service, Shriners Hospitals for Children, and the Smithsonian Institution.

What’s more, early this year, Convio acquired GetActive, which has a platform for advocacy campaigns and content management. It also has been a boost for the customer base.

Last year, Convio generated $34.3 million in revenues. However, the net loss is a hefty -$12.5 million.

The lead underwriter on the IPO is Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and the proposed ticker symbol is CNVO. You can find the prospectus on the SEC website.

To check out other IPOs, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Home Depot (HD), Private equity, Citigroup Inc. (C), Merrill Lynch (MER), First Data (FDC), Lehman Br Holdings (LEH)

The 18% haircut on Home Depot’s (NYSE: HD) sale of its supply unit was not much of a surprise. Real estate continues to ail and the credit crunch added to the pressures. But the big test for private equity is the upcoming $29 billion buyout of First Data Corp (NYSE: FDC).

Well, Barron’s [a paid publication] has an excellent analysis on the deal, which will require a whopping $24 billion in debt financing and is expected to close at the end of the month.

So, will there be pushback from the lenders — which include Citigroup (NYSE: C), Credit Suisse (NYSE: CS), Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) and Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER)?

Keep in mind that First Data already has a sizable debt load. The pricing on the new debt could sustain a material discount. If so, the lenders may need to take a write off or sell loans at a loss.

For example, First Data’s interest payments may eat up most of its free cash flows. And, if the growth slows down, there could be negative cash flows.

In a restrained credit environment, this is not what lenders want to hear. In other words, I think we could see some fighting from the lenders to try to get a lower price on this deal.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Deals, Industry, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” has run at the top of the front page of the New York Times for decades. But, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking that a step further. It will begin to run a breath-taking amount of news from the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and the AP. Google has licensed the feeds and will run the entire stories from the sources. It solves a dispute it has had with some news agencies which claimed that Google was using their headlines to draw users without compensating them as the content holders.

It also changes the Google News model. Google will no longer just run headlines. The stories from these four sources will no longer show up when they run in other media. AP stories are currently picked up by Google, even when they run at AP’s newspaper partners. This has sent traffic to a number of newspaper websites, and that will traffic flow is very likely to be undermined.

Google’s ability to run entire stories will also allow it to sell advertising on these news pages. Google News is currently “ad free.”

Continue reading Google (GOOG): All the news that fits

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Personal finance

Money magazine’s Jean Chatzky has a pretty cool idea for a gift for your recent college graduate: a few sessions with a financial planner. Most kids need financial help, and many parents are ill-equipped to provide that. Even if a parent is wonderfully competent, kids may not want to hear it from them.

In addition to giving your child the services of a financial planner, I have a couple other ideas for small gifts to help your grad avoid the financial ditches that so many find themselves digging out of later in life:

• Suze Orman’s The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke — This book is pretty readable and covers pretty much everything a young un’ needs to know: credit cards, housing, cars, investing, and frugality.
• A gift card to a store like Dollar Tree (NASDAQ: DLTR) or 99 Cents Only (NYSE: NDN) — This would of course be tacky as a graduation gift on its own, but these are wonderful places to buy household items at great savings. If you can get someone into the habit of shopping at these kinds of stores, you will save them tons of money over the years.

For the fashion-conscious grad, you may also want to consider How to Be a Budget Fashionista. It’s written with women in mind but much of the advice is pretty universal.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Deals, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), General Electric (GE), Amazon.com (AMZN), Nokia Corp. (NOK)

A number of media outlets, lead by the New York Times, reported that the NBC unit of General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) would not renew its video content deal with Apple iTunes. NBC wanted Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to charge more for its content.

But, the news reports were not enough for Apple. It decided to make the parting unpleasant and announced that the TV network was being greedy. Charging more for programming downloads just wasn’t acceptable. NBC’s programming is about 30% of the video inventory at iTunes.

The question is whether this is a real blow to Apple. For the time being, the answer is no. Video sales for the iPod are modest. But, Apple is likely to launch new versions of the iPod that have better video capacity and upgraded screens.

Will video become an important part of multimedia player downloads? Content companies can try to take their business elsewhere. Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) is opening a multimedia store for cell phones. It sells almost 400 million handsets a year. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) will have one.

Apple believes that content owners cannot bypass iTunes because it has too large a share of the market for digital content.

They are probably right and NBC will probably be back.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Short stories, Comfort Zone Investing

Ted Allrich is the founder of The Online Investor and author of the just released book: Comfort Zone Investing: Build Wealth And Sleep Well At Night. In this weekly column, he’ll offer advice to investors who are just getting started.

There’s a way to make money on falling stocks. It’s called “going short” or short selling. But before you put in your order, you need to know exactly what you’re doing and the consequences. One of them: You can lose an infinite amount of money when you short a stock. Maybe reading further is a good idea.

We’ve all had stocks that have dropped dramatically in a day or two or week, sometimes 50% or more. What took months or years to achieve is lost in a matter of hours. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make money that fast, or at least make money from stocks when they go down? You can if you short a stock and understand the total concept.

First, shorting a stock means you sell something you don’t own. The process is simple: You put in an order to Sell Short a stock, and your broker executes the order, if the stock can be shorted. Sometimes certain stocks aren’t allowed to be shorted but that’s another column. Let’s deal with the ones that can.

Continue reading Comfort Zone Investing: Going Short: Easy Money?

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Deals, Industry, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” has run at the top of the front page of the New York Times for decades. But, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking that a step further. It will begin to run a breath-taking amount of news from the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and the AP. Google has licensed the feeds and will run the entire stories from the sources. It solves a dispute it has had with some news agencies which claimed that Google was using their headlines to draw users without compensating them as the content holders.

It also changes the Google News model. Google will no longer just run headlines. The stories from these four sources will no longer show up when they run in other media. AP stories are currently picked up by Google, even when they run at AP’s newspaper partners. This has sent traffic to a number of newspaper websites, and that will traffic flow is very likely to be undermined.

Google’s ability to run entire stories will also allow it to sell advertising on these news pages. Google News is currently “ad free.”

News providers to Google now have to worry about whether Google will end up highlighting a small number of news providers who will license to Google all of their content. If so, the traffic to other Google News pages may fall off and the traffic that is sent to the 4,500 other Google News sources could drop sharply.

Google News is a sort of content democracy now, running stories from all over the world based on how the search engine’s technology finds and ranks them. Google says that will not change: “Nothing happens algorithmically to these partners that doesn’t happen to anybody else,” it told Reuters. But, it appears that Google wants to make money on news, so the way that news is picked could eventually change as well

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Cisco Systems (CSCO), AutoZone Inc (AZO), Options

AutoZone, Inc. (NYSE: AZO) implied volatility elevated into mid September earnings per share (EPS) and outlook: AutoZone is expected to report earnings per share on September 18. AZO management will be speaking at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS) 14th Annual Retailing Conference on September 6. AZO September option implied volatility of 36 is above its 26-week average of 25, according to Track Data, suggesting larger price risks.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NYSE: CSCO) implied volatility flat into September 5 analyst meeting: Cisco is recently up 40 cents to $31.83. CSCO will be holding an analyst meeting in San Jose, CA, on September 5. BAMO says, “we believe the meeting will be used to showcase CSCO’s growing technology platform and emphasize the company’s mantra of the network as the IT platform.” CSCO September option implied volatility of 26 is near its 26-week average of 28, according to Track Data, suggesting non-directional risk.

Daily options update is provided by Stock Specialist Paul Foster of theflyonthewall.com.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Google (GOOG), small business

Money keeps flooding into the online video sector. And the latest deal is a $34 million round for Dailymotion SA. Investors include Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity.

Interestingly enough, Dailymotion is based in Paris, France. And it’s feeling the pressure from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s YouTube (who isn’t?).

Yet, Dailymotion still attracted 14.7 million unique visitors in July. Also, it looks like the company is going to rev up its partnerships.

I had a chance to talk to Chase Norlin, who is the CEO and founder of Pixsy (a multimedia search service). According to him:

“Get big or get out. That’s the underlying reasoning behind these large online video financings. The entire space is going to become consolidated, which means that if you haven’t hitched your dingy to a cruise ship you’re going to be left out on the ocean to fend for yourself. Companies like Dailymotion may need to do acquisitions to bolster their presence in this category as the bigger players stake their turf and own larger portions of the online advertising pie.”

If you want to check out more venture capital fundings, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Filed under: Deals, Home Depot (HD)

Looks like Home Depot (NYSE: HD) has finalized the sale of its wholesale distribution business as of late yesterday. Sheldon Liber wrote a good piece on this deal earlier in the week, and the deal was expected to close by the end of this week — which it did. The $8.5 billion sale was made to a group of private equity interests, and was down from the initial $10.3 billion price from the group just in June of this year. What a billion-dollar difference a few months makes, eh?

The Home Depot will retain a 12.5% stake in HD Supply (for which it’ll pay $325 million), along with guaranteeing about a billion in net debt as part of the agreement mandated by the equity group that sealed the deal. With the new-found cash, The Home Depot plans to use quite a bit of the sale sum to repurchase its own shares in the open market on the way to a total stock buyback amount of $22.5 billion. After the deal was made public yesterday, the home improvement chain re-stated its intention to purchase up to 250 million of its own shares in the range of $37 to $42 per share. Why does the company so feverishly want to buy back so many of its own shares? How about its reduction of the HD Supply deal by $1.8 billion? Well, it’s retaining 12.5% ownership now, so that reduction is not as large as it seems.

According to reports, the deal came in at about $1.8 billion below the June agreement due to market volatility, and recent teeter-totter activity in the market almost caused a restructuring of the original agreement. Regardless of the real reason, the deal was done and completed yesterday for the $8.5 billion amount. The deal was actually completed last Sunday, but was only made public late this week after every detail was finalized and probably triple-checked. With HD shares hovering at under $39 — they’ve been under $44 for three years now — it’s of little surprise what this massive buyback is intended for. What’s your guess? Will the 12.5% stake start growing like a fertilized weed soon? It better, since HD shares are sitting on the sidelines with little movement. Well, for now at least.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This