Main Dish

- Video games sales topped $7 billion last year. 8 games were sold every second, phenomenal.

- Google now a domain registrar? But they don't want to sell domain names...

- Umair thinks the American shareholder is "giving money away" when Gilette's CEO gets paid $153m as part of the P&G/Gilette deal. My POV: the guy added billions in shareholder value, paid out a healthy dividend consistently, expanded the company by adding thousands of jobs and entered new markets, has a 23% operating margin (which in CPG is pretty damn impressive), and generates about $2 billion in free cash every year. Kilts didn't do that all by himself, but the company sure as shit wasn't on autopilot either. Pay the guy, he really did earn it... and don't get into that line of "how much is enough" of argument because we live in a capitalist market system where non-pariticipants don't get to decide how much someone gets paid.

- the WSJ has an expanded section on the Social Security debate, including an awesome section on the basics of the system. It's important for everyone (in the U.S.) to bone up on their knowledge of how social security works in order to make informed decisions about what policy proposals you will support.

- Paul sent me this great link to a service called Dropload. If you have ever had a problem emailing large file attachments, this is for you. By the way, you have seen me reference "Paul sent me this or that" before. Paul Jozefak is one of my partners, he does our European investing. Considering that Paul and myself are the only men in our entire partnership, we have to stick together.

- RFID at the core of the business process. I would expand on this and say that what is happening is that the physical world is getting more intimately connected with the business process world. With applications becoming truly composite in nature, businesses are able to refine their processes in any number of ways and having it reflected immediately in physical operations.

- Roger McNamee has a blog. Man, I gotta come up with a catchy brand name for my blog... suggestions?

- the guys at In-Q-Tel fund some really interesting technologies. The latest is Cambrios.

- Verizon and Fox are rolling out a series of 60 second episodes of a 24 series that is intended to be viewed on your cellphone. Cool. I can see it now:

Jack Bauer: I don't have time for the goddamned protocol, there's a nuclear weapon in <connection lost>

- Another unhappy United Airlines customer (do they actually have any that are happy with them?)

- I'm pro-gun... pro rubber band gun that is. Actually I did join the NRA recently in response to the SF Board of Dupes plan to cast aside the 2nd amendment and confiscate guns from law abiding citizens.

Comments

[Scott]

In reference to the P&G&G article, there may be some merits behind Kilts' financial incentives, but a former exec who's done his share of deals once told me "If you're the buyer and you want to get a deal done, spend the extra dollars on the target company's CEO and you'll get the best bang for your buck ...every time." The WSJ article on Kilts also touches on this one-time sweetener scenario. The buyer can reprice the per share quote or add additional perks for the shareholder or employees, but what might amount to a penny or two in shareprice can add up to a major, MAJOR incentive for the CEO to just seal the deal. In that situation, P&G is acting in their shareholders' interest by getting them a better, cheaper deal using that tactic, while Gillette shareholders probably ended up getting slightly below market value.

I just have to wonder, if really true, what goes through a CEO's head when they are obviously trying to be bought.

[jeff]

Yeah, but if the CEO in question is a shareholder (through options) then his/her interests are aligned with the broad base of shareholders.

At any rate, it's not the CEO that puts the deal forward, it's the board of directors and it's ultimately approved by the shareholders (which in the case of G is a bunch of institutional funds who are pretty saavy about such deals).

Incentives are pretty normal, but often come with golden handcuffs that prohibit the executives from heading for the door as soon as the name on the building is changed.

[jeff clavier]

- Catchy: you're stuck with something revolving around "Main Dish", aren'tyou ?
- Dropload: this sounds like a reincarnation of a .com play I look at in 2000: click2send.com, that tried to morph itself into an enterprise play (Middlewire). Paying lease installments on these EMC boxes were killing you at that time. We'll see if these fare better.

[Paul]

Call it "Nothing's Normal"!

[jeff]

or maybe just "Not Normal"

[Allan]

"Investment dished out", perhaps?

(It's late: that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)

[Om]

ddon't need a name jeff. you are a brand, and its catchy enough for me. mcnamee will have to wait a long time before he earns space in my net news wire aggregator. i know you, i respect you and its all because you are JN.