Many things are down during the recession. But there’s a boom in click fraud, the tricks used to make online ads seem more effective than they are. And companies that police the practice are seeing fresh business as Internet concerns seek to hold onto advertisers during the downturn.
Activision Blizzard shares are down sharply for the second straight day after CEO Bobby Kotick disclosed the sale of a large block of shares.
Kotick personally sold one million shares at an average price of $10.1834 a share, and another 242,425 shares held by a trust he controls.
Good news is hard to come by these days, so here’s a nugget about a business that’s found a silver lining in the economic clouds. I grabbed breakfast this morning with Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia, a privately held software-as-a-service company that sells a browser-based version of Microsoft Exchange email that customers use for a pay-as-you-go monthly fee.
Over the past few months, Americans have been hearing the word “depression” with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own.
Think long term. Long, long term. In the short term, there will be pain in Silicon Valley. Start-ups will have to survive 2009. Layoffs will be in fashion: “You didn’t do a layoff? What’s wrong with you?” Venture capitalists will be hit just as hard. Their investors–the endowments, the pension funds and others–are hurting.
Silicon Valley was all a flurry late last week after reports that some respected venture capitalists woke up from their rosy daydreams to the fact that Wall Street’s meltdown is going to have a big impact on their future.
IDG News Service is reporting this afternoon that Microsoft (MSFT) has instituted a hiring freeze, apparently in response to the deteriorating economy. According to IDG, the company started notifying employees of the freeze today. The company has 91,000 employees worldwide, including 54,000 in the U.S.
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