Home Authors Posts by Connie Loizos

Connie Loizos

Infertility affects nearly all of us, either directly or through our friends and family. And growing numbers of people are doing something about it. In 2007, according to the CDC, 430 fertility clinics in operation performed 142,415 Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) procedures, in which eggs are surgically removed from a woman’s ovaries, combined with sperm in a laboratory, and returned to her body or donated to a surrogate.
At 33, Roy Bahat is leading IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corp's digital media business that one former insider estimates accounts for roughly $120 million in revenues. It’s a big job for a young guy. According to the Web metrics company Quantcast, IGN.com, a gaming information site, is visited by 23 million people each month, while IGN’s second biggest property, Askmen.com, gets 13 million visitors monthly. In the last couple of years, IGN has also branched out into other areas, including original video, digital distribution, and online gaming. As a division of a group within News Corp. that’s not faring terribly well, Bahat is also in a challenging spot.
When the economic crisis first struck, one company more than nearly any other seemed perfectly positioned to capitalize on the endless waves of layoffs that began to ripple across the country, then the globe: the business networking site LinkedIn. In a November 2008 article, Founder Reid Hoffman argued specifically to BusinessWeek that LinkedIn was a […]
At 452 feet in length, Larry Ellison’s “Rising Sun” is such a hideous monstrosity that the yacht, the world’s sixth-largest, is too long to dock at most of the world’s marinas and has to be docked at commercial ports instead. Indeed, to get closer to humanity, Oracle’s CEO actually had to commission a new yacht in 2007; a European shipbuilder whose name […]
During a late afternoon meeting today at MySpace, chief executive Owen Van Natta, formerly the chief operating officer of Facebook, was nudged out the door. Just nine months after joining the company, he’s being replaced by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, executives who were brought in alongside Van Natta last April and who will now report as co-presidents to News Corp.’s digital chief, Jon Miller. What happened? A News Corp. insider tells me tonight that the departure is a shock to no one for a variety of reasons, beginning with the near simultaneous way that Van Natta, Jones, and Hirschhorn were brought in. “Owen had little to no influence over that decision,” says this person, who adds that among Miller, Jones and Hirschhorn, Van Natta was “the odd man out” from nearly the outset. Friction grew more extreme over time. “While Owen was off giving speeches around the world, Mike and Jason were doing the hard work,” say this person. “After a while, no one was sure what they needed [Van Natta] for.”
Earlier today, Google unveiled Buzz, a Facebook-like platform built into Gmail that allows users to see their contacts' status updates, media, and favorite links -- including via popular applications like Twitter, Picasa, and Flickr -- as well as to "like" them. The social media tool also allows users to let friends know where they are, a la the popular application Foursquare. The announcement, which came at 10 a.m., was eagerly awaited. Reactions to it since have been downright ugly.
We’ll never know if Ali Fedotowsky was really falling in love on this season’s “The Bachelor.” In the middle of the show’s filming, the perky advertising accounts manager at Facebook was told that if she wanted to hang on to her job, she’d better get back to it, tout de suite. It was a devasting […]
At an annual investors’ meeting in the wake of the dot bust, several LPs in Redpoint Ventures growled that Geoff Yang — who while golfing with John Walecka in 1999, decided to form Redpoint — was spending too much time on the links. (They had looked up his tee times at the Sharon Heights Country […]
A study released earlier today shines a bit more light on why most people are afraid to gamble, while others are willing to roll the dice despite sometimes poor odds of a higher return. Published by scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at University College of London, the research centered on two women with Urbach-Wiethe, a disease that damages the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain linked to feelings of fear and aggression. While it’s generally the case that
Two weeks ago, President Obama told the nation that he was proposing a new small-business tax credit, “one that will go to over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages.” While we're at it, the president added, “let's also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment; and provide a tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment." Many of our readers wondered what those words meant, exactly. So we looked for answers from Steven Franklin, head of the tax and venture capital and private equity funds practice at Gunderson Dettmer in Silicon Valley:
vcj
vcj

Copyright PEI Media

Not for publication, email or dissemination