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Archive for the ‘Board Of Intellectual Capital’ Category

Bad Money Still Drives Out Good

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 25, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good analysis of a former collegue of mine, Tim Oren. To read the full article, please click here.

“Gresham’s Law hasn’t been repealed, but it’s taking on new forms in Washington these days.

Having put ‘bad’ money – printed by fiat or ‘secured’ by loans against taxpayers yet unborn – into the banking system in the first round of bailouts, the Feds now presume to rewrite not only future but existing loans. The consequences were on exhibit in Washington last week as financial genius Barney Frank and other politicians “…managed to demand more loans for consumers while simultaneously giving lenders new cause to wonder if they’ll ever be repaid.” They and other congress critters want to make it legal for bankruptcy judges to forcibly abrogate the terms of existing mortgages.

As pointed out in this WSJ article, most of the lending side of the credit market does not come from banks: “Most investors who lend in these markets are not recipients of financial bailout money, so Congress can’t simply browbeat them into making another big bet on the American consumer. ” These lenders have ‘good’ money that is still subject to the reality check of the market, rather than political exigency. But a move to retroactively rewrite credit contracts by government fiat will affect them as well. The result?

First, to make the world of collateralized mortgage debt tremble once again. While the consequences of foreclosures fall on the junior tranches of packaged debt – now mostly written off – in many case the results of forcible, retroactive modification of a contract’s conditions would fall pro rata across all tranches, causing the value of those that are still standing to slide as well. Yet more fear to hang over new as well as existing mortgage backed securities.”

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Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Intellectual capital, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Technology, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.

I recently finished a iPhone project with a company out of Sweden, Resolution Interactive. My task was to reshape the business model from traditional PC- online to something fruitful. Coming into to the company early last spring, the finances was well below bad, the team was in dissaray, and the revenues where nill. When iPhone developer program then came available in mid april, we saw the chance and made a jump for it. Although pretty messy to begin with, Apple continued to publish supporting materials, reached out with a network of visionaries and helped us go through the ups and downs of discovering a new market, new business model and new way of marketing.

When we in mid October release the first game – Clusterball Arcade – we received som good reviews and quickly went for title nr. two – AquaMoto Racing. Succesful in my mission, I was able to create a new businessmodel and find a new market for a struggling game company – this with the help of Apple and iPhone.

So, the release of Android from Google, the OVI initiatives from Nokia etc. are all good, but I wonder if they really will be able to provide the multitude of support that Apple was able to provide to me. Also, the unified developer environment (Xcode), the one device, clean business model and pre-existing audience to market too makes it very hard to understand how anyone will be able to compete with Apple on this market segment.

Mark Sigal just posted a excellent article at GigaOm. His analysis below summed this up very clear to me:

“The reality is that openness is just an attribute -– it’s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It’s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective.”

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U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2009| Leave a Comment »

(Bloomberg) — The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.

“We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country,” Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said on the Senate floor Feb. 3. “Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. How much from the FDIC? How much from TARP? When? Why?”

For more information on this topic, please visit: Bloomberg, TARP, Howard Lindzon blog, Brookings, Money Morning.

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Emphasys Medical Up For Sale

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Distressed Intellectual Property, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Life Science, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

emphasys-logoEmphasys Medical Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based medical device company focused on emphysema, has retained Gerbsman Partners to find a strategic buyer, according to VentureWire. The company canceled an IPO last spring, and before that had raised around $80 million in VC funding. Shareholders include Advanced Technology Ventures (17.8%), Morgenthaler Ventures (13.8%), St. Paul Venture Capital (11.5%) OrbiMed Advisors (13.7%), ABS Ventures (10%), Morgan Stanley Venture Partners (7.4%), Cargill Ventures (6.1%) and Neww Enterprise Associates. www.emphasysmedical.com

Links: peHUB, Biospace, DOW Jones,

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More Tech Start-Ups Call It Quits

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

mk-au416_shutdo_ns_20090211185403WSJ reports: As Funding Dries Up, Fledgling Silicon Valley Firms Are Shutting Down; Fears of Chill on Innovation

“Many start-ups survived last year by slashing costs and deferring development projects. But as demand for their products continues to deteriorate and funding dries up, these young firms are now running out of lifelines. Many are calling it quits, recalling the dot-com bust earlier this decade.

…

Venture capitalists pulled back sharply in the fourth quarter as credit markets seized and stock markets collapsed. Venture capitalists invested $5.54 billion in U.S. start-ups in the fourth quarter, 27% less than the third quarter, according to data compiled by VentureSource.”

Another excellent take on the same theme is Stacey Higginbotham´s analysis at GigaOm:

“The crisis in the financial market is coming home to roost for startups of all kinds. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article detailing the death or firesale of several startups in the last few weeks. It’s grim, but this is only the beginning for many venture-backed companies, as we reported back in October. Over the next few months, we’ll see continuing news of businesses giving up the ghost as their venture backers take a hard look at upcoming cash needs and decide to prune.

…

Venture capital is a cyclical business that follows the fate of the stock market, so it depends on where a startup is as the cycle turns from boom to bust. Unfortunately, many of these unlucky startups are getting crushed under the wheel as it rolls through the downturn. Right now is a good time to work on an idea, but a bad time to be selling things.

However, innovation won’t just stop.VCs are still making selective investments in early stage startups at newly reasonable valuations, hoping those deals are ripe by the time the economy reaches the next boom.”

Gerbsman Partners focuses on maximizing enterprise value for stakeholders and shareholders in under-performing, under-capitalized and under-valued companies and their Intellectual Property. In the past 60 months, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in maximizing value for 51 Technology, Life Science and Medical Device companies and their Intellectual Property and has restructured/terminated over $770 million of real estate executory contracts and equipment lease/sub-debt obligations. Since inception, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in over $2.2 billion of financings, restructurings and M&A transactions.

Gerbsman Partners has offices and strategic alliances in Boston, New York, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Europe and Israel.

For more information on Gerbsman Partners, please visit our website at www.gerbsmanpartners.com

By way of Stacey Higginbotham article at GigaOM. For the full WSJ article, please click here

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