Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Verizon Communications (VZ)

It is the kind of deal most people would have thought would go to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Google (NADSAQ: GOOG). Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will out-source the advertising sales for all of its internet operations.

In an arrangement that bypassed the usual subjects, AOL, a division of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) will handle selling Verizon’s on the internet inventory through the internet portal’s advertising network and marketing operation called Platform A. According to Reuters, “The Verizon ad deal, whose price wasn’t disclosed, will give Platform A the right to represent all of Verizon’s advertising space on the Internet, including premium space.”

In the last year, Google, Microsoft, and Time Warner have all made buys of businesses that will help them sort, target, and sell online ads. Huge web operations like Facebook and MySpace have already cut deals for having one of the large portals or search companies to sell their inventory, but AOL has not been in that mix.

It looks like the incumbents for online advertising representation have a new competitor.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Apple Inc (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), General Electric (GE), Time Warner (TWX), Wal-Mart (WMT), Serious Money, DJIA, NASDAQ

It was June 7, 2006 when I set up a tracking portfolio for our great eight stocks. AOL Money & Finance started BloggingStocks with a focus on these companies based on investor interest. Today, they still stimulate a lot of interest, and comments.

The following share prices are from the original tracking date now updated to last Friday’s close, April 11, 2008. Earnings season is upon us again. The Iraq war is still in the headlines, as are the presidential elections, energy prices, recession fears and our latest calamity — the shameful Washington/Wall Street axis of financial evil. Here are the BloggingStocks eight:

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) was $60.00 and is up to $147.14 gaining 145%.

eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) was $32.00 and is down to $30.87 losing 3.35%.

General Electric (NYSE: GE) was $34.50 and is down to $32.05 losing 7.1%.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) was $380.00 and is up to $457.45 gaining 20.38%.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) was $22.50 and is up to $28.28 gaining 25.69%.

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) was $17.50 and is down to $14.27 losing 18.46%.

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) was $47.00 and is up to $54.80 gaining 16.6%.

Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) was $31.00 and is down to $28.34 losing 8.58%.

So after 22 months we find four stocks are up and four stocks are down. Apple is the clear winner and remains the company to watch going forward. New trend-setting products are introduced regularly and few companies can match its inventiveness or marketing genius. Steve Jobs has hit a grand slam. Microsoft, the perennial cash generating machine, came in second with very strong results given the current say of the economy.

Among the surprises and the one I have taken the most flack for is that Google has not done very well in my eyes. It has been highly volatile and makes for a good trading stock, but if you add the dividend of 3.48% to Wal-Marts appreciation you’ve about the same growth with one tenth the downside risk.

eBay and GE are remarkable for having reached nothing over our review period, and although they are down now I consider them break-even investments because they’ve been trading a few bucks higher and a few lower the entire period. Lots of promise, tiny results.

Lastly, Time Warner and Yahoo! are huge disappointments. Time Warner (owner of BloggingStocks) has a new CEO and change is in the air. Yahoo! is in Microsoft’s cross-hairs and looks care about it will be something else in a few months. Ironically the two companies are in the midst of discussions to find a way to help each other out of their stagnation. I hope they succeed. Both have great franchises that are struggling to gain traction. Both must contend with Google and Microsoft.

Going forward Apple may be the best bet and Microsoft will probably continue to mint money. The others might just tread water for a while.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of EBAY, and TWX.

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Filed under: Forecasts, Bad news, From the boards, Competitive strategy, General Electric (GE), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Black Friday

General Electric (NYSE: GE) not only disappointed Wall Street investors this past Friday with its horrible results, but shocked investors as CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave the “all is alright” signal in mid-March. He should resign as he has had almost 7 years to grow this once great company.

GE should also bite the bullet and spin off several segments into separately traded companies. I wrote about this extensively last year for AOL, but now the rationale is abundantly clear. This company–a major conglomerate–cannot deliver decent shareholder returns. Immelt took the reigns of GE on September 7,2001 when the stock was at $40. Nearly 7 years later the shares are at $32 and barely holding on. I find it pleasing that some “value” investors think GE is interesting at this level. These were the same investors that found GE interesting and a value-play at $38 last year.

The problem with GE is not that it’s too big: the problem is it is too complex. The largest industrial company in the world now is Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) with expected revenues this year of $550 billion. This company however is strictly in the energy sector–it’s measurable and quantifiable. GE is a mish-mash of businesses, from light bulbs to jet engines to appliances to consumer loans, whereby some segments are doing well and others horribly. How does any analyst assign a proper PE ratio expectation?

One segment, the infrastructure division grew its revenues by an admirable 23% this past March quarter and its profits by 17%. With this kind of growth and visibility into the next 18-24 months on revenues because of contractual commitments, this division alone could command a 25 + PE ratio. GE as a whole is now trading at 14 X 2008 EPS estimates of $2.20-2.30.

The GE Financial segment was woeful and provided the negative surprise. This segment on its own would trade at a PE ratio of between 9-11 times. The NBC-Universal division showed only 3% year-over-year growth, but cash flowed very well. This segment should command a 15-17 PE multiple.

With GE split up into several separate trading entities, a new board of directors would be established for each segment as well as a new CEO and CFO. With new people come new ideas, fresh strategies and basic underlying industry expectations. The new segments would be focused unto its own business and attract a new set of Wall Street analysts. With this comes new and hopefully original research and stock price targets.

The problem with the current GE structure is basic industrial analysts follow the company. An industrial analyst isn’t an expert on media properties. An industrial analyst is not an expert in financial services or infrastructure companies either.

If GE truly wants to “bring good things to life”–for its ever patient shareholders, the board of directors should turn on the light bulb, terminate an ineffective Jeffrey Immelt and start to spin off the parts. The spin offs would realize an incredible value that frankly the current GE is not going to see for a long, long time….

Georges Yared writes about game changing growth stocks in Game On Investing

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Filed under: Business, Internet, E-mail, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Salesforce for Google Apps goes live this day, which basically means that Salesforce.com users can integrate Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Google Speak and other Google services with their Salesforce account.

Why exactly does this matter? Basically, it gives small business owners a one-stop shop for managing their workforce, customer, and marketing information. Saleforce has its own email application, for example, allowing you to keep track of business related emails from the same interface you use to manage contracts. But now that there’s Gmail integration, you can send an email from Salesforce.com, Gmail, or a desktop application like Outlook linked to your account. All of your information will be viewable from the Salesforce web interface.

The folks at Common Craft put together a easy explanatory video which you can see above. We kind of like it superior than the official video from Salesforce, but you can check that one out after the jump.

Continue reading Google and Salesforce.com announce Google Apps integration

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Mibbit is a new IRC client that — wait, they still make IRC clients? While AOL, MSN, Google, Skype and others dominate the world chat scene these days, once upon a time IRC or World wide web Relay Chat was king. And while IRC doesn’t get much attention these days, it’s still alive, kicking, and useful if you need a multi-user chat system for communicating with co-workers, open source project developers, or anonymous folks you might want to trade files with.

So what makes Mibbit different from old school IRC clients? It’s web-based, which means you can run it from anywhere. But despite the fact that you can run Mibbit from your web browser, you get all of the features you’d expect from a desktop based IRC client, and then some.

There’s a search engine that lets you find channels by keyword. You can change the color scheme, and even use a built in translator to communicate with users in different languages. Each new channel or server screen opens in a new Mibbit tab, and if you’re running Mibbit in a tabbed browser, you’ll get adorable little alerts like “Server stuff!” or “People said stuff!”

There’s even a Mibbit widget that you can install on your web site to let visitors chat with you via IRC.

[via WebWare]

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much each social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third celebration desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend’s blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.

Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you’ve been looking for a faster way to read updates, you’re in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and grant you post items directly to FriendFeed.

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Numerous readers noted the proposal by the Australian government for legislation to allow employers to snoop on employees’ email and IM conversations. This is being proposed in the name of protecting the infrastructure from terrorism. The attorney-general cited the Estonian cyber-attacks as a reason why such employer monitoring is necessary in Australia — never mind that the attacks were perpetrated by a lone 20-year-old and not by a foreign government or terrorist. The law permitting intelligence agencies to snoop on citizens without permission expires this June, leading to the government’s urgency to extend and expand it. The chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia said, “These new powers will facilitate fishing expeditions into employees’ emails and personal use rather than being used to protect critical infrastructure. I’m speaking about corporate eavesdropping and witch-hunts… If an employer wanted to [sack] someone, they could use these powers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DigitAl56K writes “The Washington Post reports that ‘The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon’ and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said that ‘Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement.’ Initially, it appears that the administration plans to leverage conventional satellites for domestic surveillance purposes. Congress last October delayed launch of the DHS office that would coordinate law-enforcement requests for satellite and other technical data, and demanded answers to legal questions about the program. The administration supplied answers that some Congress members characterized as inadequate and appears determined to go ahead anyway.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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