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PapayaMobile Bearing Fruit from Android Growth
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 “The name ‘Papaya’ is very easy to remember and when we started the company, we found it was very easy to type ‘Papaya’ on the cell phone keyboard,” Shen recently told me. “At th...
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A number of private equity firms are interested in taking a look at Barnes & Noble (BKS.N), with names including Bain Capital, Apollo, TPG Capital and others, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. Still, it was unclear how any private equity interest might be structured, given that billionaire investor Ron Burkle and company founder Leonard Riggio have large shareholdings in the bookseller. It was also unclear the level of interest or whether any bids will materialize, the sources said. The No. 1 U.S. bookstore chain, which has a market value of about $900 million, said on Tuesday it was reviewing st
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High Obesity Correlates with Low Venture Activity
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Correlation is not causation. I know. Anyone who’s ever watched a scientist raise distraught eyebrows at a piece of shoddy science journalism knows that. Nonetheless, correlation has its place. While it may not prove anything, it provides a sense that seemingly disparate indicators are somehow linked. For today’s experiment in correlation, I’ve followed up on yesterday’s widely reported Gallup Poll numbers on U.S obesity, to see how obesity rates correlate with venture capital investment. (The report showed a wide disparity in obesity rates state-to-state, ranging from 34% in West Virginia to 19.5% in Colorado, with an average of 26.7% nationwide.) Correlation between obesity and low venture funding was shockingly high. The eight states with the lowest obe...
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peHUB Second Opinion 8.04
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South Has Fewer Bankruptcies: Consumer bankruptcy filings rose in July but the South is doing better than the rest of the country.
UAE open to Blackberry Talks: The United Arab Emirates is open to discuss a solution although the decision to ban primary Blackberry services remains in place. CareCredit Probe: NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating CareCredit, a division of General Electric Co.’s GE consumer finance unit, saying users of its health-care credit card were misled about terms. Providence Looking to Raise $8 Bln: Providence Equity Partners, which is expected to begin fundraising later this year, is looking to raise $8 billion. Bartiromo Hits 15 at CNBC: Maria Bartiromo reflects on her 15 years at CNBC, in a surprisingly not very sarcastic piece from Dealbreaker. LinkedIn's First Deal: LinkedIn has made its first aquisition and is buying Pittsburgh-based mSpoke to help improve its ability to filter messages. Google buying Slide: Techcrunch is reporting that Google will announce Friday its $182 million buy of Slide, as it gets more serious about social games. Job Envy: The grass isn't always greener in the corner office. That's the message from a new report on compensation by the Association for Financial Professionals. Read more »
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Box.net Busting Out, Hires Levin
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 Levin, who was already a member of the board, was previously with Intuit. He joins the Box staff with a mission to keep the company’s growth headed in the right direction, co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie (pictured here) told me. Plus, Levin owns his own small airplane, which has already come in handy. Just last week, Levin flew down to Southern California with some Box staffers on a sales call. C...
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Doerr, Rubenstein Among “Giving Pledgers”
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 Among those to sign on are venture capitalist John Doerr (along with wife Ann) and buyout king David Rubenstein. It's not a legal contract -- described as a "moral" one -- but each participant is expected to write a letter explaining their decision to pledge. A bunch of them already have been posted online, but neither Doerr's nor Rubenstein's are among them. While we wait, here is the letter from Blackstone Group co-founder Pete Peterson: Read more »
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PE Firms Invest More, Pay Less?
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 I bring it up today because of some new data from Thomson Reuters (download here), about PE-backed M&A volume in 2010 (through Monday). It works out to 1,755 global deals valued at just over $103 billion, compared to 1,558 deals worth nearly $39 billion over the same period in 2009. Read more »
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(Reuters) - Cartier has sued the online “flash sale” retailer HauteLook, accusing it of damaging the luxury goods maker’s brand by selling damaged and second-hand Cartier merchandise without permission. HauteLook is “causing immediate and irreparable harm to the Cartier brand and trademark,” Cartier said in its 36-page complaint filed on Tuesday evening in Manhattan federal court. Cartier claimed that HauteLook has sold used Cartier watches despite maintaining on its website that it “never” sells “secondhand merchandise, ever.” It also said HauteLook has also sold Cartier goods that were damaged, were shipped in the wrong packaging, or carried defaced authenticity certificates, and sometimes included a Cartier wa
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(Reuters) - Private equity investment in emerging markets totalled $13 billion in the first half of 2010, a 55 percent leap on year-ago levels and on track to beat 2009 levels, industry group EMPEA said on Wednesday. An investment surge in Latin America and continued strong activity levels in China and India were behind the increase, the Washington DC-based Emerging Market Private Equity Association said in a statement. EMPEA said 402 deals were done in the first half of the year, compared with 280 deals at this time in 2009. The average deal size at $51 million, was also bigger than last year. Fundraising levels for private equity investment also rose, with $11 billion raised in the first half of 2010 versus $9 billion raised in the same period in 2009. Asia
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(Reuters) - Barclays Plc’s (BARC.L) wealth management arm is boosting its alternative investments business with two senior hires to its private equity and hedge funds divisions, as part of its aggressive global expansion plan. Barclays recently launched an investment and hiring surge aimed at jump starting its ambitions to join the top tier of global wealth managers. Boudewijn Jansen will join the group as head of private equity origination from HSBC Private Bank (HSBA.L), where he was global head of private equity in the alternative investments division, the company said. Sarah Newman will be head of hedge fund origination after 14 years working in equity derivatives and fund linked products business at Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) and previously JP Morgan (JPM.
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Forbes Sells Investopedia for $42 Million, Ignores PE
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 Founded in 1999, Investopedia is an investing education and financial information web site. The Edmonton, Canada-based company provides a library of financial terms, articles, tutorials and investing education tool. It attracts 2.2 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to comScore. Read more »
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peHUB First Read
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 * Ryan McBride: How Eli Lilly let a billion dollar molecule slip away * Connecticut wants hedge fund managers, and is making its case over lavish steak dinners * Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London falls early, European shares slide on banks and the Nikkei loses 2.1%. * Barnes & Noble is on the block * "Pace of new troubles" slows for American Capital * Catharine Rampell: Why is still feels like a recession * Brian Wong may be the youngest entrepreneur to ever raise venture capital * Shawn Tully: How Evercore has become the new force on Wall Street * Brett Arends: U.S. companies may be sitting on record piles of cash, but they're also racking up record debts. Read more »
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Horizon Pharma Inc., a Northbrook, Ill.-based drug developer focused on arthritis, pain and inflammatory diseases, has filed for an $86.25 million IPO. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol HZNP, with Jefferies & Co. and Piper Jaffray serving as co-lead underwriters. The company has raised around $54 million in VC funding since its 2004 founding as Nitec Pharma. Shareholders include Atlas Venture (17.4% pre-IPO stake), Essex Woodlands Health Ventures (14%), Scale Venture Partners (13.4%), NGN Biomed (9.9%), Sutter Hill Ventures (5.9%), FirstMark Capital (7.9%), Global Life Sciences Ventures (7.8%) and TVM (5.7%). www.nitecpharma.com Read more »
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Bertram Capital Busts Through Fund II Target
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 Bertram launched fundraising back in March with a $500 million target. It had originally planned to begin marketing in early 2009, but held off as smaller deal sizes allowed Bertram to lengthen the investment runway of its $350 million first fund. Read more »
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peHUB Second Opinion 8.03
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Alleged Insider Trading at BP: The SEC is investigating whether people illegally profited at BP from trading on nonpublic information in the weeks after the Gulf disaster.
CIC Wants Harvard Portfolio: China's $300 billion sovereign-wealth fund is eyeing Harvard University's endowment to buy the university's stakes in half a dozen U.S.-focused real-estate funds. Mexicana in Bankruptcy: Mexicana de Aviacion, Mexico’s biggest airline by passengers, filed for protection from creditors in Mexico and the U.S. Secret Web Meetings: Google Inc., AT&T Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. executives are meeting behind closed doors with U.S. officials on proposed FCC rules on how to handle Web traffic such as Google’s YouTube videos. Mass. Pension Hire: Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Trust appointed Michael Trotsky as executive director after the previous head said the public fund doesn’t adequately compensate its employees. Forced To sell BlackRock Stakes: BofA and PNC may be forced to sell their stakes in BlackRock under far-reaching rules proposed last week by the Basel Committee of Bank Supervision. Young Investors More Cautious: A study from the Merrill Lynch Wealth Management Affluent Insights Quarterly says that young investors have become as risk averse as older investors, from Dealbreaker. New York a Tech Backwater: The New York tech scene will never equal Silicon Valley, according to adgrok. Diamond Lake Lawsuit: A hedge fund run by Dow Kim, a former senior executive of Merrill Lynch, is being sued by an ex-employee two years after the fund, Diamond Lake, failed to open. Science of Retweeting: A study finds that 29% of users had retweeted a link without actually looking at it while 36% said they retweeted to spread insight. American Idol Dumps Sony: TV juggernaut has signed a new distribution and marketing deal with Universal Music Group which CNET says could affect downloads for years. Read more »
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