 I wish I had gotten this out sooner... but I was completely swamped in preparation and coordination of our panel last week. And... and then I promptly went on vacation for a long weekend. Casual Connect Seattle was great. I have to say, I was totally impressed by the level of attendees -- not just the successful turn-out, but the high-caliber of people walking around everywhere. Casual Games Association asked Corum to build an afternoon for casual gaming executives called, "Funding & Exit Strategies". This was a perfect venue for us, because we've got great experience in the broad gaming sector, and excellent contacts in all realms of the industry. Essentially, we built the afternoon into 3+1 panels (+1 representing an outside speaker who talked about raising capital). Corum's 3 panels were 1. Gaming Market: M&A Overview. 2. Prepare Your Company for the Exit. 3. Buyer's Panel, featuring the heads of Corp. Dev from Activision, THQ, Playdom and Zynga. The final panel was clearly the gold rush for our attendees. All-in-all, we executed very well, with a full room. Looking forward to being invited back next year.
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 I've been cranking away on our monthly Webinar. On the first Thursday of every month, our company hosts a worldwide webinar... usually attended by a few hundred software and internet CEOs, Founders, and Execs. Putting together the content is the job of one Dougan Milne. I secretly enjoy this little portion of my job. It's like a mad rush at the beginning of every month to get all the most recent market data quickly condensed and turned into something credible for us to present to all of our software chums. That isn't to say it is a slap-job.... oh, quite the contrary: we are tracking and categorizing all of this data on a day-by-day basis. But... getting it into presentation form is the tricky bit. Anyways... of the 60 minute presentation, I usually report for about 20 minutes of it. The Charts, Graphs, Data... and generally, all the stuff that they are constantly telling me to "hurry up" with. ;-) So.. tomorrow is April Fools. It is also the first Thursday of the month, and if you have time tomorrow morning to drop by and get some insight into our market... you are cordially invited. http://www.corumgroup.com/Events.aspx See you there.  I just browsed through the Tech M&A Banking Review from the 451 group. It was interesting, to say the least, as I realized - being an insider at Corum - how undisclosed data can highly skew, augment, corrupt the overall circumstances of a research document. We work through these same problems here and often use/site 451 data for our own projects... so I understand the increasing complications of undisclosed information. What struck me as most interesting was that when looking at stats for Software M&A transactions, we were not ranked in the top-10 for volume. In fact, some of those who were ranked in the top-10, I know for a fact produce less deals than us.  I'm really excited about this. 1. Like saleforce.com, iTunes, Android and a handful of other platforms, Google is using their enterprise platform as a launch pad for gadget, application, widget and extension building. 2. Google has made one nice, easy little place to find all these tools. 3. I hope there are no infringements in me using this new Google Marketplace logo. I started thinking about what this means for my business - the business of software M&A. I've come-up with a few ideas... most of which need to be mulled-over a while longer: 1. In terms of finding potential companies that Google may be interested in acquiring, I think Google themselves have just made this task a little easier! 2. Easier, but not.... Google will tend to look for: A. Talent B. Technology/Innovation C. Broad Reaching Market Opportunities. 3. As Google enterprise pushes forward, do they move forward on a Platform --> Extension basis, or do they try to move forward in a traditional Platform --> Feature basis. The latter would be more inclined for small, flexible acquisitions, while the first would tend to make fewer, larger, market impact strokes. These ideas need to be refined more... but I'll work on that here at Corum. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. |
AboutI work in Software M&A. This is a personal / business blog. 
 dougan This snow is crazy.... one of the bigger NW dumps I've ever seen. http://t.co/3BO5tfQ 17 hours ago · reply dougan Great comparison piece on the middle east by one of my favorite authors, Mary Doria Russel: http://goo.gl/KqMsH 2 days ago · reply dougan foxy knoxy 7 days ago · reply Archives
September 2011
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