Why Yahoo!'s Board Wants A Deal Before January 7th

Why Yahoo!'s board is working hard to ensure they do something with the company before January 7th.

Read the full Forbes Post

Sphere: Related Content

The Difference Between a Tech "Greenfield Gorilla" and a "Nichey Nancy"

Is Your Tech Company a Greenfield Gorilla or a Nichey Nancy?

Read the full Forbes Post

Sphere: Related Content

Asking Al Gore About Apple's Board & How They Pick Talent

My two-part question to Al Gore from last month in Hong Kong.

Read the full Forbes Post

Sphere: Related Content

Good News: Even When They're Given Inside Information, Politicians Are Hapless Traders

Frustrated that politicians can trade on inside information and you can't? Take heart: they're so hapless, they can't make money from it.

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

The Worst Tech Decision in the Last 10 years: Selling PayPal

While it's easy to take the money when it's flashed in front of you, PayPal's decision to not stay independent is the dumbest one in tech from the last 10 years.

Read the full post on Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

6 Things Jeff Bezos Knew Back in 1997 That Made Amazon a Gorilla

If you're building a company today, here are 6 things Jeff Bezos knew back in 1997 that made Amazon (and will make you) so successful.

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

How to Get More Technical Graduates in the U.S.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I was watching the season finale of Bill Maher's Real-Time last Friday, when he threw out a statistic that shocked me: in 2009, the U.S. graduated 39,000 people with computer science and engineering degrees and 82,000 with visual arts degrees.

Maher argued that this is a big problem for us as a country. He suggested we're not being tough enough with kids pursuing a visual arts education. We need to tell them to be more realistic and we need more technically qualified people to fill those jobs if our country is going to compete with China and others.

He's right.

But his panel flatly disagreed with him. It seemed to unite those on the right and the left that the government should try and steer how individuals decide to pursue their educational goals.

Many on the right want the government to have less influence on education -- not more. Rick Perry -- if you believe him -- even wants the Department of Education disbanded. If these conservatives had their way, as many students could pursue degrees in visual arts as wanted. They could find a good private institution that would give them a degree, in exchange for a costly amount of tuition.

For those of the left, most would believe the government should be able to provide an education but it's up to individuals to have the free choice to select their education.

The power of the individual is sacrosanct in America. We have an innate belief that the guy next to us on the subway could be the next Steve Jobs from Apple(AAPL_). Jobs was a hippie. He dropped out of Reed College after freshman year. How can we try and restrict the next individual genius that might bubble up from the bottom of our system.

Look, I happen to be a guy who was an English major in college. I should probably be living in my mother's basement by now, but I actually think a liberal arts training is a great foundation for anyone in life pursuing a variety of later technical professions. So, I'm sympathetic to those who say let the kids decide if they want to be dance, philosophy or social studies' majors.

Read the full post on TheStreet.com here

Sphere: Related Content

What Is Next For Apple's iAd?

Apple has to decide whether it wants to play in the ad world or not.  Eddy Cue will now make that decision.

Read the full Forbes post.

Sphere: Related Content

How a "Cash-Rich Split" Could Take Yahoo! to $41/Share

The best option for Yahoo! shareholders is the company disposing of its Asian assets in a structure called a "cash-rich split."  Here's how it could work and turn Yahoo! into a $41/share stock.

Read the Forbes post

Sphere: Related Content

Steve Jobs Had No Business Being Successful When He Returned to Apple

Steve Jobs -- according to his track record to that point in his life -- had no business making Apple successful when he came back in 1997. That he did makes him all the more remarkable.

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

Key Apple Executive Off Stock Grant List

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor11/09/11 - 06:00 AM EST


NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Last week, Apple(AAPL_) granted several key executives -- including Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, Peter Oppenheimer, and Bob Mansfield -- large Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grants that vest over five years.

They are essentially golden handcuffs that highly motivate these men to stick around in this post-Steve Jobs era.

One senior executive notably absent from the list is Jony Ive. I hope it doesn't portend Ive's departure. We'll see some SEC filing in the coming days or weeks about a similar grant to him.

Jony Ive is the key product and design person at Apple.

In Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, it's clear how important Jony is at Apple. Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, said of the special bond between Steve and Jony: "A lot of people in Steve's are replaceable. Not Jony."

Jobs held Jony in very high regard. He rescued Jony from the old Apple and convinced him to stay after Jobs came back to the company in 1997. Even though no one outside of Apple had heard of Jony then, the two men formed a special bond and collaborated together on the iMacs, iPods, iPhones, and iPads.

Jony's design lab in Apple's Cupertino headquarters is under lockdown from outside visitors. It's likely that today, in that lab, there are the products that will amaze us from Apple (in some form) for the next 15 years.

At the recent company-wide memorial for Jobs at Apple, Jony gave -- in my view -- the best speech about Steve.

Jony found it hard when Steve left the company before on his medical leaves. There's a story in Isaacson's book about how Jony met Steve at the airport in Silicon Valley after Steve returned from his liver transplant in Memphis. It's clear that Jony missed him, but was also bothered by the fact that many outside of Apple wondered if the company could be as "innovative" without Steve. Jony took it as a slight.

I hope that Jony now has his time to shine in the sun over the next several years at Apple -- along with all the other talented Apple executives.

Read the rest of the post on TheStreet

Sphere: Related Content

The Owner of Yahoo!'s Patents Could Cripple Facebook's IPO Aspirations

With 1,100 granted US patents, Yahoo! could choose at any moment to offensively go after Facebook, Microsoft, and other large Internet companies.  This IP portfolio could become one of the most hotly sought after jewels in the Yahoo! empire in the next two months.

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

Eric Schmidt Doesn't Believe For A Second That Siri Is A Threat To Google

Despite making a big deal about it on Friday in his answers to the US Senate, you shouldn't think Eric Schmidt or any Google exec is fretting yet about Siri as a threat - even though they should.

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

Daniel Loeb Wants Jerry Yang Off Yahoo! Board

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Daniel Loeb has been silent since announcing his $1 billion stake in Yahoo!(YHOO_) two months ago. That changed this afternoon.


Read the full post in TheStreet

Sphere: Related Content

More Proof That Siri Is Intended to Be A Google Killer

More details on why Siri is a Google Killer.

Read the full post on Forbes.

Sphere: Related Content

Why Apple Wants to Make TVs

Jobs' biography makes it clear why Apple wants to make its own TV sets

Read the full post in Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

Jackson Says Groupon Share Offering Has `Too Much Risk'

My take on the Groupon IPO: Too much risk

See the video on Forbes here

Sphere: Related Content

My Question For Jerry Yang

My question for Jerry Yang about Yahoo!'s new/old mission statement.

See the video on Forbes

Sphere: Related Content

Thanks For Reading in October

I started writing in TheStreet on finance and technology back in 2008.  It's fun and helps me formulate my thinking on different topics.

In October, I had my biggest month yet in terms of readers of my Forbes posts since I started contributing there in March:

- 383k unique visitors
- 725k page views

Thanks for reading.

Sphere: Related Content

Yahoo!: Digging Into So-Called Scoops

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Along with the broader market, Yahoo!(YHOO_) has been sacked this week.

It is now back to where it was trading in early October. Last week, Yahoo! was up more than 25% in the last month. It's now only up 13% for the last month. (Nasdaq is still up 7.6% for the last month.)

Don't get me wrong, I don't like that. It stinks, in fact.

However, let's take a step back from the ledge.

There were five things that were reported on with certainty last month that were not necessarily certain at all.

1. A couple of weeks ago, many media reports said that Jerry Yang told the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong that he wasn't going to sell the company. That was odd, as I was in the audience and don't recall him saying that at all. I forget his wording.

He might have said they weren't going to be a forced seller or they didn't have to sell if they didn't want to. He was saying they are playing from a strong hand. Maybe it was a bluff. Later on in the discussion, he said very clearly that they (the board) were going to do what was right for the shareholders. I took that to mean that -- just as everyone suspects -- this thing is still in the middle of a sales process.

2. A Wall Street Journal article a couple of weeks ago quoted some private equity bidders as saying they thought Yahoo! was only worth $16 to $18 a share in a buyout and was already over-priced at $15 as the stock was at $11 in August. Really? I think Apple(AAPL_) has a fair value of $25 a share. It's all hype and I'd really rather buy it at that price than $400.

3. A Bloomberg report on Friday night interrupted an otherwise pleasant dinner I was having. It quoted -- in its "scoop" - "5 unnamed sources" who said that Yahoo! was going to separate their Asian assets in a tax-free manner that would lead to a stock buyback or a dividend.

Read full post in TheStreet

Sphere: Related Content