SiliconBeat

In a quiet, ignoble manner, the final chapter of the dot-com bubble came to a close this week. What, you didn’t hear the book closing? Join the club. I almost missed it myself.

On Tuesday, the central legal case that sought to assign blame for that era’s excess fizzled to an end. A handful of large banks put their second-most recent scandal behind them when they agreed to settle claims of rigging the IPO market for $586 million. They’re still trying to put last year’s little financial hiccup behind them.

That nine-figure sum only sounds like a lot of money because you probably work for a living. (That is, if you’re among the fortune 90 percent in Silicon Valley.) In fact, the legal firm that brought the class action suit against 309 start-ups and 55 underwriters at one point were asking for $12.5 billion.

The settlement provides a muddled, un-satisfying conclusion to an era. We wanted clarity. We wanted answers. We wanted someone to blame. Instead, we have fog. And the people we wanted to tar as the bad guys, turns out they were just scapegoats. Maybe. Or maybe not. Either way, take hear that the unfairly accused seem to have bounced back. Read the rest of this entry »

Should Skype, the Internet telephone company purchased by eBay in 2005, come out the loser in its growing litigation against Joltid, which licenses critical peer-to-peer communication technology to the company, the “continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible”, according to a filing eBay made with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday.

Joltid, the British Virgin Islands-based company founded in 2001 by the folks behind Read the rest of this entry »

Add eBay to the list of  technology company seeking to rescue its employees underwater options. Last week, the online auctioneer’s board of directors approved putting two proposals before shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on April 29 that would facilitate the exchange of underwater options for a smaller number of restricted shares  that will retain value as long as eBay’s stock price does.

“Like many companies, we have experienced a significant decline Read the rest of this entry »

Remember way back in the beginning of this year when Microsoft supposedly said it was willing to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion? (And that was before the company reportedly was willing to bump the offer up even more).

Well, not that I’m actually suggesting anyone do this, but…Thanks to the stock markets’ implosion, if you had enough spare change lying under your couch, you could now buy eBay AND Yahoo for less than that. Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet auctioneer, eBay, reported a sequential drop in quartlery quarterly sales Wednesday for the first time in its history as a public company. Sales totaled $2.12 billion in the 2008 third quarter, up 12.1 percent from the year before quarter, but down 3.6 percent from the quarter before, something that has never happened before.

The results included an accelerating sequential drop Read the rest of this entry »

EBay said Tuesday that Marc Andreessen has joined its board. Andreesen, who was a co-founder and a principal architect of Netscape Communications and later served as chief technology officer of America Online, which acquired the pioneering browser firm in 1998.

Andreessen also founded Opsware, formerly known as LoudCloud, a provider of data-center automation software that was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007. His most recent endeavor is as co-founder of Ning Read the rest of this entry »

The Yahoo showdown with Carl Icahn is only two weeks away. Today, Yahoo got some great news that Legg Mason, which owns 4 percent of the company, will back Yahoo over Icahn. I may yet have to eat crow over my prediction that Icahn would win a shareholder vote. On the other hand, the folks at Legg Mason and I agreed on one point: Both sides should settle this before shareholder’s vote in August 1. In a statement, Bill Miller, chairman and chief investment officer of Legg Mason Capital Management, said:

“We would prefer that the company and Mr. Icahn reach a mutual agreement on the composition of the Board and end this disruptive proxy contest.”

But no matter what happens over these next couple of weeks, I’ve come to believe that the Yahoo ordeal is part of a larger story playing out across Silicon Valley. In 2008, we’re seeing the end of Web 1.0 as several first-generation Web companies are either collapsing, or beginning to wheeze heavily. Read the rest of this entry »