"Billionaire investor Carl Icahn says he would oppose a potential bid for Yahoo! Inc. by former AOL Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Miller.
“I don’t think any of the shareholders would be interested in selling a partial 51 to 52 percent of the stock even at a premium,” Icahn, a Yahoo board member, told CNBC in an interview today. “I’m not involved whatsoever with what he’s doing.”
Yahoo is exploring its options after revenue growth slowed and its stock lost two-thirds of its value since mid-February. The company is in talks with AOL about a possible combination, and CEO Jerry Yang plans to step down as soon as the board finds a successor.
Miller held talks with investors about a possible purchase and could make an offer of as much as $22 a share to buy all or part of the company, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Miller, a partner at Velocity Investment Group, hasn’t announced a bid and didn’t return an e-mailed request for comment today. "

"Shalom, Christmas Shoppers: Israelis Sell Cosmetics, Toys at the Mall
Determined Vendors Haggle, Hail Customers From Kiosks; $500 for a Day's Work
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By ILAN BRAT and MIRIAM JORDAN

Ana Guembes made a quick trip to the Westfield Fashion Square mall in Sherman Oaks, Calif., one recent morning to pick up some face powder at Macy's.

But before she could get to the department store, she was accosted by a salesman at a cosmetics cart in the middle of the mall corridor. "Hello, miss. I want to show you something," he called out to her, brandishing a tube of lotion with Dead Sea minerals. Soon the salesman was applying eye gel, salts and creams to Ms. Guembes's skin while chatting away about their cleansing and beautifying properties.


Young Israelis are manning kiosks in just about every significant mall in the U.S. thanks to a song by one of their own. WSJ's Ilan Brat reports.
"I didn't mean to buy anything," said Ms. Guembes, a 40-ish nanny. But after 45 minutes at the cart, she'd spent $129 on a container of eye gel and two nail-care kits. "They know how to catch you."

At malls across the country, shoppers are being besieged by a determined crop of salespeople: young Israelis who man mobile carts and have a no-holds-barred selling style.

Amid the grimmest holiday season in years, these workers are approaching passing mall shoppers or calling out from their stations, pitching body lotions, irons, toys and knickknacks. They demonstrate their wares by flying remote-control helicopters, steaming shirts and applying makeup. Instead of charging American-style fixed prices, they harness the culture of the bazaar and often quote numbers based on what they think a customer will be willing to pay.

It's a far cry from the selling style of many of their fellow cart vendors who tend to be more passive and let customers come to them.

'We're Hunting!'
"We're not selling here -- we're hunting!" said Ms. Guembes's Israeli vendor, who gave his name only as Yaniv. Working 12- to 14-hour shifts for commissions of 20% to 30%, the Israelis can take home $500 a day during the holidays.


ANA GUEMBES
Turkish, Chinese, Indian and other immigrants have long played a big role in the mall-cart business, thanks in part to the relatively low cost of entry -- about $10,000 for setting up a cart or kiosk.

But in the past decade, Israeli vendors have become the dominant players in the cart world. At the annual trade show for the retail cart and kiosk industry, nearly a third of the attendees are now Israeli, say wholesalers and industry trackers. In a first, next year's show in Las Vegas will host a cart-operating workshop entirely in Hebrew.

Most Israeli-run carts are manned by two to four people. Typically, the mall stints are a fast way to amass cash to finance a globe-trotting trip, a rite of passage for many Israelis after they complete their mandatory military service. Some hear about the jobs on Hebrew-language Web sites, such as "The Jackpot," where cart operators advertise. Operators often offer a kind of package deal, where they subsidize housing and transportation for their temporary workers.

For five consecutive seasons, Angelina Kissa sold aromatic pillows, head-massagers and hair-straightening devices at carts in Ohio, Colorado, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

She lived in apartments in groups of up to eight, with rent deducted by her bosses from her paychecks. She says she made $8,000 her first season at carts near Akron, Ohio.

"Christmas in America, people buy so much," says Ms. Kissa, who is now 28 years old and works in Las Vegas as a distributor for a fruit-juice company. "A good hustler can sell anything, like ice to Eskimos."

Some of these temporary workers are here without work visas. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted occasional raids, including a sweep of several malls in 2004 and 2006 that led to the arrest of more than 40 Israelis who were working illegally, according to ICE. But those crackdowns haven't appeared to temper the number of Israeli cart vendors. Some Israeli-owned companies are lobbying Congress to create a special temporary work visa for the mall-cart workers.


RAMI FEINSTEIN
Israeli folk-rock musician Rami Feinstein first worked the carts in 2003, dreaming about making enough money to record an album. He felt awkward in the beginning because of the pushy tactics required to sell fingernail-buffer kits and other products at a cart in a suburban Minneapolis mall.

"You have to be very strong mentally to hear, 'No, no, no,' and to still be smiling...and still wait for the person that would buy," Mr. Feinstein says. But the money was good, so he persisted. He's sold at malls every holiday season since then.

He channeled his frustration into a song called "Something Amazing," about the sales pitch he used to sell cosmetics. Seacret Spa LLC, a Phoenix-based company that sells skin-care products using minerals from the Dead Sea, learned of Mr. Feinstein's song and offered to produce a video as a recruitment tool.

The video became popular among Israeli youth when it first appeared on YouTube in 2007. The 32-year-old's album came out earlier this year. Izhak Ben-Shabat, president of Seacret Spa, says thousands of Israelis have signed up to staff carts that sell his products. He says the products are now in 550 U.S. locations, up from 20 in 2001.

Wholesalers say cart operators have tried hiring Americans to staff carts, but they lacked the art of the hustle -- too polite to move the merchandise, especially for 12 hours straight.

"Israelis are natural-born closers" on the sales floor, says Steven Malkin, marketing director for Vancouver-based Relaxus Products Ltd., which supplies slippers, toy airplanes and other items to cart operators.

Adva Arnon, an Israeli who was saving for a South American trip, pushed remote-control helicopters and Dead Sea skin-care products at carts in upstate New York and on the West Coast two recent holiday seasons.

Having grown up on a communal farm, or kibbutz, in Israel, she didn't think she'd excel at the job. But she learned to grab customers and rub their hands with lotion or Dead Sea mud, telling them of the wonders it would do for their skin. She started high and then lowered the price if the customer agreed to buy two products, or threw in another item free if the customer took two at "full" price. She remembers selling $450 worth of Dead Sea products to a single customer on several occasions.

The secret is to "talk, talk, talk. You can't let the customer think too much," says Ms. Arnon, now 28 and a university student in Jerusalem.

The Israelis' hands-on approach irks some Americans. In recent weeks, Katie Kovacik says she has watched Israelis at several carts in a mall outside Chicago use the same clip-on hair extensions and straightening irons on one shopper after another. "That's gross," said the 26-year-old, who's studying to be a skin-care professional.

After fielding complaints about overly aggressive vendors, some mall operators have taken measures. The Natick Collection, a mall in Natick, Mass., forbids cart salespeople from calling out to customers as they pass.

No-Touch Policy
The Westfield Group, an international owner and operator of malls, has a no-touch policy for cart sellers, unless a "customer shows interest and agrees" to product sampling. The company also stipulates that salespeople must stay within 24 inches of their carts. "There are very specific rules of engagement, and they are enforced," says Katey Dickey, a spokeswoman for the Westfield Group in the U.S.

Some non-Israeli cart operators have mixed feelings about the competition. Israelis "are really hassling people a lot," and people are losing respect for the carts, says Ayhan Yuce, a Turkish immigrant who sells jewelry, sunglasses and toys at carts in about 60 U.S. malls. Still, he's considering studying Hebrew.

"I really would like to hire some of those Israelis," he says. "They are really good salesmen. You have to admire them."

Write to Ilan Brat at ilan.brat@wsj.com and Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com"

Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Mean Street: The Reluctant Prophet of Goldman Sachs

Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Mean Street: The Reluctant Prophet of Goldman Sachs: "The latest of these prophets is Arjun N. Murti, an influential Goldman Sachs oil analyst, who has marched his bullish oil followers straight off a cliff.
You may not have heard much of Murti, a publicity-shy 39-year-old from New Jersey. He leads the Goldman Sachs Americas Energy Research Team and has been researching energy stocks since he was 23.
Along with OPEC, T. Boone Pickens and some pipeline-destroying Nigerian rebels, Murti moves the oil markets. “Even if you disagree with their views, the problem is that Goldman does carry such credibility,” said one energy trader to the New York Times in May. “There are a lot of traders who are going to buy based on their reports.”
In 2004, Murti offered up his “Super-Spike” theory–saying future price spikes in oil are inevitable. Murti’s argument was simple: The world is running out of oil, and its expanding economy would continue to push prices higher. Unpredictable geopolitical forces, meanwhile, would create the “super” in the Super-Spike.
On March 30, 2005, with oil trading at $54, he laid down a controversial call. A barrel of oil could fetch $105 by 2009.
As prices rose over the ensuing three years, Murti’s reputation grew in kind. Barron’s dubbed him “Mr. Crude Oil.”
Then came the next big shocker. On May 6, 2008, Murti predicted $150 to $200 oil within six to 24 months. Prices dutifully jumped. Then they rose even higher, peaking at more than $147 on July 11."

A survey says 1,132 chiefs have left their posts this year amid a tough economy.

"ushing the chief executive turnover rate in a popular survey to an all-time high.

This year, 1,132 CEOs have left their posts, according to employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. That is the highest nine-month total since the firm began keeping track in 1999, and makes it likely that 2008 will eclipse the record 1,478 seen in 2006.

The tally of departed CEOs includes those who have retired, left for better jobs or otherwise resigned on their own accord. But Challenger's own chief executive says the rise in the turnover rate probably reflects increasing pressure on corporate leaders from their boards and shareholders.

"When in a difficult economic time, more companies report poor results and shareholders are upset," John A. Challenger said. "Sometimes, the CEOs have actually mismanaged; sometimes they're scapegoated. Either way, they're more vulnerable."

The survey is based on public announcements and covers private and public companies. Among the prominent CEOs who stepped down this year were Angelo R. Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Corp., Meg Whitman of EBay Inc. and Philip J. Schoonover of Circuit City Stores Inc.

Richard Koppes, a corporate governance attorney at law firm Jones Day in San Francisco, said the high salaries paid to many chief executives can also be a liability.

"There's a lot of anger at executive compensation that is causing boards to say, 'We're paying you well, so you'd better perform,' " he said.

The digital information age is also contributing to turnover, said Leslie Gaines-Ross of public relations firm Weber Shandwick, which issued a study on the executive departures this year.

"These are much harder times because of the Internet, where more information and leaks and chatter from former employees and others create more chances for the CEO to be compromised," she said.

"It's the nature of the CEO job to have a short shelf life . . . ," she added. "If you make it to five years, you're an old-timer."

Other findings from the Challenger survey:

* Twenty-seven CEOs were fired, 354 resigned and 283 retired. Other chiefs lost their jobs for other reasons. Challenger said the numbers don't tell the whole story: Often executives resign or retire under board pressure.

* Turnover was heaviest in the healthcare sector, with 206 departures. In part, however, that stems from the large number of small healthcare businesses, Challenger said.

* Financial firms took the second-highest hit, with 133 exits."

JIS CEO fired

Wednesday, 08 October 2008
RJR News understands that Huntley Medley, Chief Executive Officer of the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), has been booted from the position.

Mr. Medley was dismissed with immediate effect Tuesday night.

Sources say no reason was given in his dismissal letter, which came from the Public Services Commission.

However, sources also report that he was blamed for logistical problems with the government's celebrations for the Beijing Olympic team.

There have been widely reported problems with the celebrations which started last week.

Some government insiders have also complained that Mr. Medley's management of the Government's Public Relations has not been stellar.

In March 2007, Mr. Medley replaced former Chief Executive Officer of the JIS, Carmen Tipling, who spent six years in the position.

Mr. Medley was Press Secretary to former Prime Minister PJ Patterson from 1997 to 2000, and again from 2002 to 2004.

He has close to 20 years experience in the media both locally and regionally.

Mr. Medley was responsible for the JIS' operations, which include the editorial,

Wachovia Corp. (NYSE: WB) Chief Executive Kennedy Thompson was living on borrowed time. The company, though, had a funny way of showing it.

In 2007, Thompson was not awarded cash incentives or performance-based stock to Thompson because things were going poorly. Or were they?

"The Compensation Committee considered that while 2007 performance did not meet expectations for reasons noted above, under Mr. Thompson's leadership, earnings per share growth and Wachovia's tangible return on equity have been at or above the median of its peer group for 2007 and for the 3- and 5-year periods ending December 31, 2007," the company said in its latest proxy statement.

The company's board showed its displeasure and granted him premium priced stock options valued at $8.2 million. His total compensation was more than $21 million. Thompson did not have an employment agreement with Charlotte-based Wachovia and therefore would "only" be eligible for a severance of $1.45 million based on his years of service as of December 31. But don't shed a tear for Thompson.

Since Wachovia's performance exceeded its peers for the three-year period ending December 31, 2006, Thompson received a stock award valued at $15 million. In 2005, he got a cash incentive award of $5 million and a stock award valued at $14 million, according to the proxy.

Remember that under Thompson's leadership, Wachovia's shares plunged more than 58%. As Bloomberg News notes, his credibility was "dented" after he said earlier this year that the company's $24 billion purchase of Golden West was "ill-timed." Furthermore, the bank reported a higher-than-expected first-quarter loss, cut its dividend by 41% and raised $8 billion.

Once again, shareholders lose while overpaid chief executives win. This is a disgrace.

Tech Startups 3.0: Co-Founder of Facebook to Leave...fired?

"And the email from Moskovitz:

At various times in our progress, people have come up to me to deliver a now familiar question: “did you ever imagine Facebook would be this big?” And I give a familiar answer: “well… yea, actually”. Frankly, Mark and I knew even at the beginning this was something the world needed. We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world. We could see far enough in the future to know there would be an impact, we just didn’t know exactly what it would be. Now I can look back on our progress and see the ways the world has changed, the ways we have changed it. We’ve altered the future in a score of ways, from making it easier to look up phone numbers and email addresses to making it more difficult for terrorists to isolate impressionistic youth in the middle east. At the same time we’ve built a competent and vibrant organization, driven by a passion to push the world more open.

In the process of helping to build a company, I found I had another passion: making companies themselves run better. It’s easy to confuse this with a desire to manage, but even when I tried to do that I found myself drawn back to code for the solutions to my problems; I didn’t want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them. Communication is the key to scale in any size organization and technology is the key to communication. I’ve seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook’s tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature. Further, the things we’ve scoped for Facebook’s product team to do are the right things to be doing and I wouldn’t have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction.

And Facebook is moving in the right direction. When Facebook has a billion members (and 800 employees? maybe 900?) and someone leans over to ask me if I ever imagined it would get that big, my answer is going to be “you’re damn right I did. how come it only has 20% of the market?”. To know that this is Facebook’s future and decide not be a part of it is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but it’s allowed me to have a broader perspective for the future. Like you, I’ve worried about the people leaving the company but it took becoming one of them to understand that this is just another part of the ecosystem (you should just take my word for it though). I’m not leaving the movement - I’m becoming a new part of it. The inevitable flux of the men and women behind these organizations is what moves the industry forward in the same direction in a way that cross-company collaboration alone never will. As the world moves to modular stacks and applications built up from a smorgasbord of platforms instead of single toolkits, mortgage eating apples then the companies that build the parts will need to act more and more like cooperative teams in a single larger organization. As Justin would undoubtedly say, I am simply viewing the industry from a different level of abstraction. These changes are difficult and sad, and that’s certainly an understatement for me… but change brings new things and this particular change will bring a new ally to our mission - I think we can all be pretty pumped about that.

Whether I work here or not, life settlement I’ll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook’s product and purpose. Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company’s enduring success irrespective of changing faces.

Justin and I going to be around for at least another month and I am really looking forward to going deeper on this idea with everyone and how we can continue to work closely with Facebook. I’ll always be really proud of the work we’ve done and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a uniquely remarkable team. We’ll also be at the Q&A later to help continue the conversation right away.

Dustin

Hired killers might have killed CEO, says Amar Singh

Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh on Sunday said killers hired by business rivals might have murdered Graziano CEO L.K. Choudhary.

Addressing mediapersons outside Choudhary's house at Sector 30 where he had come to offer condolences to the family, Singh said: “The way the CEO was assaulted points to professional killers. It appears business rivals may have hired the killers to eliminate Choudhary. Labour union leaders or workers cannot dare to kill a CEO. Hired killers posing as workers may have entered the factory and committed the murder,” said Singh. He said he himself felt insecure in UP.

Meanwhile, Graziano has decided to continue its operations in India and planned to start production from Monday at its Greater Noida factory.

“Only one shift has been planned for Monday. Though PAC men have been deployed, workers still feel terrorised. They fear assault on way from home to factory. We have requested the police to provide protection to our staff buses,” said L.K. Gupta, Human Resource head at Graziano.

Steve Jobs RIP?

An obituary for Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was mistakenly published by Bloomberg News on Thursday, according to several reports.
The stock story detailing the death of the Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) founder, who is still alive, appeared “momentarily” after a reporter had updated it, Bloomberg said. The incomplete obit was distinctly marked “Hold for release — Do not use,” the reports said
Following is the opening paragraph as it appeared on the Bloomberg wire:
“Steve Jobs, who helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music and refashioned the mobile phone, has XXXX. He was TK. Jobs XXXX, TK said XXXXX.”
Bloomberg, which was founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and prides itself on its accuracy and transparency, later published a note acknowledging the story's retraction on its wire.
“An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m. New York time today,” the message read. “The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted.”

Firms Pay More for Outside CEOs

Chief executives hired outside a company are paid significantly more than chief executives hired in-house, according to a new study.

CEOs hired externally at Standard & Poor's 500 companies, for example, received a median total compensation package of roughly $12.2 million in 2007, or 51 percent more than CEOs with at least two years of tenure, who recorded a median pay of approximately $8 million, according to a study by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm based in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Internally promoted CEOs made less than both groups, earning a median pay package of roughly $6.9 million.

Motorola has tapped former-Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha as CEO

"Motorola has tapped former-Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha to run its Mobile Devices business, which has suffered six straight quarters of slumping sales.
The move comes less than five months after Motorola said it would split into two separate companies fueled by increasingly poor performance by its Mobile Devices business.
According to the Schaumberg, Ill.-based communications vendor, the board of directors on Monday named Jha as co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of its Mobile Devices Business, effective immediately.
In his new role, Jha will oversee all aspects of Motorola's Mobile Devices business, which accounts for about 41 percent of Motorola's overall revenue, and report to the board.
Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola since January, will also serve as co-CEO and has been named CEO of Motorola's Broadband Mobility Solutions business, which consists of Home and Networks Mobility and Enterprise Mobility Solutions. Motorola said that Brown and Jha will share responsibility as Motorola transitions from one company to two independent, publicly traded entities. "

Mover:Dow Kim - Diamond LakeInvestment Group LP

Dow Kim, the former head of tradingand investment banking at Merrill Lynch & Co., abandoned plans to start a hedge fund after investors backed out, according totwo people with knowledge of the matter. Kim had been in discussions with institutions that hadagreed to invest about $1 billion combined in his Diamond LakeInvestment Group LP, said the people, who asked not to beidentified because the talks were private. The New York-basedfirm had hired 30 people based on the commitments. The evaporation of credit and declines surpassing20 percent in some stock markets caused the initial investors tochange their minds, said the people. Kim had planned amultistrategy hedge fund that would trade everything fromequities to bonds to currencies. New money coming into hedge fund slowed to $29 billion inthe first half of the year, compared with $118 billion in thesame period last year, according to Chicago-based Hedge FundResearch Inc. Kim, 45, declined to comment. He was the second-highest-paid executive at New York-based Merrill in 2006, when he made$37 million. He left in May 2007 after 13 years at the third-biggest U.S. securities firm. Diamond Lake hires included David Milch, former head ofprime-brokerage services at Merrill Lynch, as chief operatingofficer; Karl Wachter, former general counsel at AmaranthAdvisors LLC, as general counsel; and Bernd Wuebben, former headof fixed income trading strategies at Bear Stearns.