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VA Software, Red Hat

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VA Software, Red Hat

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It ain't what it used to be...

They already sell placement on many sites, including Alta Vista, AOL, Excite.com, go.com, iWon, Terra Lycos, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, InfoSpace (including MetaCrawler and Dogpile). Also Internet Explorer and Netscape's browser.

I see that Discovery and NBC have board representation, along with a former AOL vp. And about half of SGI. :)

Check out the full list.

I'm not an Ellison fan by any means but I doubt he'd have to pull those stunts to raise the funds for his effort. Last year alone he made $700 million in cash exercising his options. In case you though he blew it all on a sail boat he still has $400 million worth of options that are in the money, even at the deflated stock price. Oh yeah, and that $700 million only represented about 2% of his Oracle holdings at the time.

If Oracle corporation is financially involved in this boat at all it's probably by buying sponsorship like any other corporation. Of course that eases the burden on Larry's pocketbook a bit, but in accouting terms since sponsorship is advertising and advertising is supposed to result in increased revenue in the future. So at least in that sense you can argue that he isn't pulling money out of his employee's paychecks to fund this effort.

Close, actually you're looking at a cash flow statement. This is an important financial statement, but not the best one to get profitability info from. Cash flow simply shows what the company spends its money on, and where it comes from. The $1.151 billion is cash out the door during the 6 month period, they actually invested about $1.24 billion in what I assume is the bond market. CFOs are pretty leery of investing non strategic cash in the stock market, you don't always know what the value will be when you need to use the cash. Their cash flow statement is pretty confusing, because their large cash balances roll over regularly. Imagine your bank statement, if you made $2,000/mo but had cash inflows of $102,000 and outflows of $100,000.
Profitability is easiest to see on the income statment. Apple made almost $200 million from July of last year to March of this year. They announced profits of $32 million today for the second quarter. The only other computer company I know of that made money during this period was Dell. IBM and HP made money, but not on PCs, in fact I don't think HP made money on all of their computer products put together, printers is their game. In the new spirit of disclosure, all of these figures are on a GAAP basis, so they include things like ammortization of good will and equity investment losses. None include the effects of stock options though. There are very few tech companies that still made money in 2001 after including options. Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are the only three I can currently remember.

You're totally right...its a tricky business to stay afloat in.

As far as the company's profitibility -- technically, you're right -- but technically, you're also wrong (disclaimer: I don't know how investors and banks evaluate this stuff, I can only relay the data here). In at the end of the last fiscal quarter, while they reported a $44 million operating profit, they reported a loss of $1.151 billion from investments -- out of that, only $79 mil was from new investments. (See their quote on yahoo).

One way or the other, (and FWIW, I guess) it doesn't translate directly to any real profit.


-Turkey

While major telecom companies like Global Crossing, Network+, WorldxChange, even WorldCom and Qwest are all in financial trouble, the company I work for, NOBEL, has been growing by an order of magnitude every month since its founding in 1998.

Many of our competitors, especially larger ones, made the mistake of overspending on technology infrastructure and on marketing-- blowing through billions of dollars in debt and equity financing. NOBEL is both extremely cost efficient (i.e. we make sure every expenditure is justified by generating additional profit), and we are self funded.

The attitude in our team is that we are going to take over telecom in the USA over the next 5-10 years. We are ALWAYS looking for people with strong telecom experience, both on the business end of things and in technology.

A few years ago, Ben Rosen (yes, that Ben Rosen) started Rosen Motors, which was once at www.rosenmotors.com but that now looks like that URL doesn't belong to him anymore.

He had nifty ideas for gas-turbine-generator/electric-motor hybrid automobiles with high-RPM flywheel regenerators in the trunk, but, you can guess, it didn't pan out as a feasible place for Ben to bet his future. So he downsized the dream and now makes his way selling some of the most efficient fossil-fuel-burning electrical generators the world has ever known, under the name Capstone Turbine.

Google spits out a few gobbets, too:
Speculation, speculation, speculation, and capitulation.

--Blair

Rambus does its own research, and so employs a large number of engineers. Here is their corporate profile: http://yahoo.marketguide.com/mgi/busidesc.asp?rt=b usidesc&rn=A13DC