UK report: Comcast considering $16 billion bid for broadcaster ITV (Comcast:Not So)

Tom Paine

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Update 12/22: Comcast has poured very cold water on this.
This Is Money, which appears to be the business section of the MAIL ON SUNDAY, is reporting that talks have been held between ITV and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and that Comcast is considering making an €11 billion ($16.4 billion) bid for the UK broadcaster.

Comcast been signalling clearly its international ambitions for the past year, and other news sources have suggested that ITV could be its intended target, though no other report indicated anything so advanced.

John Malone's Liberty Global is ITV's largest shareholder at 9.9%, though Malone has indicated he has no interest in bidding for control.

ITV is primarily a broadcaster like NBC rather than a distributor. Comcast once owned cable systems in the UK, but exited from the UK market in 1998. Liberty Global is one of the largest cable distributors (or broadband poviders) in the UK.

Morgan Stanley's Americas M&A chief, Bob Eatroff, is joining Comcaast officially in January. He has frequently advised Comcast in the past, including on its NBCU acquisition. Eatroff's title at Comcast, notably, will be Executive Vice President, Global Corporate Development and Strategy.

The impending Unicorn death march (VentureBeat)

Newly discovered hack has U.S. fearing foreign infiltration (CNN)

Philly Tech People News 12/18: Troy Carter's venture activities; IBC's Dan Hilferty to head national Blue Cross group

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I'm not too up to date with popular culture, but West Philly native (now LA-based) Troy Carter made a singular impression on me in this Studio 1.0 interview on Bloomberg TV from a few days ago.


In sddition to his music activities, he's a tech investor and runs an LA incubator he founded, The Atom Factory.

There seems to be a range of opinions about him in the music business, but as I said I don't really know that world. I'm just basing my impression on how he handled the interview. I was particularly interested on his views on current private valuations.





There was also considerable talk of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift's views on Spotify.


IBC's Dan Hilferty to head national Blue Cross group (Philadelphia Inquirer)

New head of Philly Startup Leaders vows to "pay back" (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Blockchain Startup Digital Asset Hires SWIFT and SunGard Veterans (CoinDesk)


Digitas Health LifeBrands Taps Annie Heckenberger As VP, Group Director, Brand Communications Strategy (MediaPost)

New Philadelphia Start-Up CLVmetrics Hires Scott Samios As COO; Plans to Grow Company Immediately (PR Web)


Vicki Lins Named CEO and President of CTAM
(Variety)

Paul Chamberlain Joins Veeva Systems’ Board of Directors (Business Wire)

QVC Appoints Mike Fitzharris as the New Leader of QVC Japan (PR Newswire)

Links 12/18: Cardinal Health subsidiary buys RightCare Solutions; Jet.com CEO Lore explains it all

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Comcast Deploys More Versatile ‘XiD’ Device (Multichannel News)

‘Re/code Decode’: Jet.com CEO Marc Lore Explains Why Fighting Amazon Isn’t a Stupid Idea (Re/code)

Cardinal Health subisidiary buys Montco health analytics firm RightCare Solutions (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Juniper warns of backdoor spying code in firewalls (PCWorld)
I have my suspicions.


Lawyer, M&A Master, CFO: SAP’s Arlen Shenkman (CFO)

New SAP Digital Moves Customer Engagement Beyond Traditional CRM (CIO Today)

LifeLock will pay a record $100M to settle FTC allegations it didn’t protect customer data (GeekWire)

Microsoft pursues analytics ambitions with acquisition of Metanautix (PcWorld)


Oracle just bought a tiny, year-old cloud computing startup called StackEngine (Business Insider)

Links 12/17: Regulators want to talk to AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile about sponsored data; Oracle needs another way into the cloud market

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Arris gets UK court approval, setting $2.1B Pace acquisition to close Jan. 4 (FierceCable)

Regulators want to talk to AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile about sponsored data (Washington Post)

WOW! Deal Could Preview Next Cable Consolidation Wave (Bloomberg BNA)

Jefferson, Philadelphia University to merge (Philadelphia Inquirer)



Oracle needs another way into the cloud market (USA Today)

Oracle Touts Cloud Revenue Growth In Tough Second Quarter (Information Week)

Why Sanofi chose Workday to replace SAP HR (Diginomica)



Salesforce is in talks for a $600 million acquisition, its biggest deal in more than two years (Business Insider)

Uber Is `Probably' IPO Bound, But Don't Hold Your Breath (Bloomberg]


You Can Now Call an Uber in Messenger, Facebook’s Window to the World (Wired)

Philadelphia CIOs Reveal Hiring Plans For First Half Of 2016 (PR Newswire)

Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index returns to negative level for December

First Round Holiday Video - Down Round?

Princeton-based Heartland Payment to be acquired for $4.3 billion; Carr's patience pays off

Tom Paine

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Heartland Payment Systems (NYSE:HPY), Princeton, one of the extended Philly area's most innovative tech-oriented firms, agreed to be acquired yesterday by Global Payments Inc. (NYSE:GPN), an Atlanta firm, for $100 per share, or $4.3 billion.

The payment processing industry is consolidating as new technologies emerge, reshaping the market. Bloomberg noted that Global Payments had about 2.9 percent of the global transactions processing market in 2014, while Heartland had about 2.1 percent, citing to the Nilson Report.

Heartland shares doubled over the past year, trading at $94.36 at midday today.

Robert O. Carr (from his  blog)

Give a great deal of credit to Robert O.Carr, Heartland founder and CEO, who started the company without a whole lot of cash and saw it through to an excellent exit, despite its share of bumps along the way.

Founded in 1997, Heartland received a major boost in 2001 when Philadelphia's LLR Partners teamed with Greenhill Capital Partners to invest $40 million in the company. Heartland did its IPO in 2005.

The biggest crisis in Heartlsnd's history was the 2008 hack into Heartland's system, at the time the largest data breach in recorded history. One estimate was that 100 million cards and more than 650 financial services companies were compromised. Heartland recovered, and Carr became a leading activist against hackers, and for instituting tougher standards to battle data breaches.

Carr also keeps an interesting blog. The son of a waitress who worked night shifts to help support the family, Mr. Carr attended the University of Illinois, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science, according to his blog.

Heartland specializes in providing payment processing services to small and medium-sized merchants. It also serves specialty niches, such as college campuses. Heartland has also been trying to becpme more of a player in the retail point-of-sale market, perhaps with mixed results.

In 2014, Heartland had revenue of $2.3 billion and net income of $33.9 million. On a combined basis, the businesses are expected to generate in excess of $3.0 billion of adjusted net revenue and $1.0 billion of EBITDA annually, Global Payment said in its release.

Links 12/16: 'Joy' brings early days at QVC to big screen

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Sequoia Capital Just Put $35 Million Into This Health Tech Company (Fortune)
San Francisco-based Clover Health received early funding from First Round Capital; its available in "only 9 New Jersey counties"(NJ only has 21).

Bradley Cooper On His Instant Chemistry With Jennifer Lawrence And Why He Tried To Talk His Way Out Of Doing ‘Joy’ (Deadline)
'Joy' relives earlier days at QVC, when Comcast owned it.

'Joy': How Production Design Made QVC the Emerald City (Hollywood Reporter)

Steven Spielberg, Jeff Skoll Talk Amblin Partners Deal: "We Are Hitting the Ground Running" (Exclusive) (Hollywood Reporter)
NBC's Universal will distribute, but not invest at this time.

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track its users, grew more than 70% this year (Quartz)



Oracle Q2 Results Beat Street; Ellison Says Cloud Business on Track (Re/code)
Ellison: on track to book $1.5 billion in software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service business in the fiscal year. But
Oracle's annual revenue should be around $38 billion, as its pretty much been for the previous 4 years.

Links 12/15: Global Payments to Buy Princeton's Heartland Payment for $4.3 Billion

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Global Payments to Buy Heartland Payment for $4.3 Billion (Bloomberg)

Dell To Sell Perot To Finance EMC Deal, Reports Say (Information Week)

Universal Display to Hit $30 as Patents Expire, Rumors Deflate, Says StreetSweeper
(Barron's Tech Trader Daily)

Apple opens secret lab in Taiwan to develop thinner, brighter and more energy efficient displays (TechSpot)

How Technicolor Plans to Beat Arris (Light Reading)

Why Gilt Groupe Is Forced to Sell, Either to Saks’ Parent Company or Someone Else (Re/code)

Links 12/14: Unisys Looks to Unify Distributed Computing at Scale; Seattle-based Tableau Software set to hire another 1,000 employees in 2016

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VMware Walks Away From Virtustream Joint Venture With EMC (Re/code)

Unisys Looks to Unify Distributed Computing at Scale (IT Business Edge)


Area firm is a leader in personalized marketing (Philadelphia Inquirer)


Rackspace Costs Seen Rising In Cloud Transition (lnvestor's Business Daily)


Tableau Software set to hire another 1,000 employees in 2016; CEO says business ‘flourishing’ (GeekWire)


Salesforce Has Acquired MinHash, Creators Of The AILA Virtual Marketing Assistant (TechCrunch)


TiVo strikes deal with Comcast/NBCU to measure Summer Olympic
audiences in 2016 (FierceCable)

Corporate IT strategies: Did Dow's win out over DuPont's in merger plans?

Tom Paine

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The Inquirer's Joe DiStefano nailed it.

In early November, he picked up a good deal of talk and confirned with the company that DuPont had suddenly put on hold its 'One DuPont' IT upgrade, a major SAP overhaul. The decision came just three weeks after Tyco chairman Edward D. Breen was named interim CEO of DuPont, replacing Ellen Kullman, who resigned under obvious pressure.

DiStefano correctly surmised that the holdup could be related to prospects for a possible DuPont merger with Dow Chemical. But even he may not have realized how fast things were moving.

Dow CEO Andrew Liveris called Breen on his first day in the offIce at DuPont in early October, and Breen was receptive to further discussions, as was widely reported. So it would seem plausible that the holdup of the IT project was related to the developing merger strategy.

But the differences in IT strategies between Dow and DuPont could be more fundamental. DuPont ex-CEO Kullman, in her July earnings call, was quoted by DiStefano as saying: ""Over the last three years we have undertaken a program that we call One DuPont, and it basically changes the fundamental transactional backbone of the company into a simplified, standardized to SAP standards, not to DuPont standards, and moving to standard costs, common chartered accounts, the whole thing, across our globe."

But Dow's CIO Paula Tolliver, in a Wall Street Journal blog post just days before the merger was announced, had a much different vision. Having spent eight years and $1 billion on a wall-to-wall SAP ERP implementation compLeted in 2014, Tolliver had some doubts about the results.

Would Dow undertake another such huge implementation? "Not in today's world," she said, implying that Dow would be looking at more flexible Cloud and SaaS solutions in the future.

So it sounds as if there were two visions of the future, and Dow's apparently won out. Though it's worth noting that to this point, the two companies' environments are virtually the same. If the deal goes through, it will be interesting to see what changes are implemented, both at the corporate level and at the three proposed business units.