Archive for February 12th, 2010
The Phone Of Warren Buffett’s Hedge Fund Cutie Cara Goldenberg Has Been Ringing Off The Hook Today
Earlier today we wrote about the 29-year old hedge fund manager Warren Buffet asked out to lunch.
Well, Reuters spoke to Stacey Asher, investor relations manager for Goldenberg’s $89 million fund.
And apparently Permian’s Manhattan office phone has been ringing off the hook today.
No news on what people want to hear from here.
Our guess:
What did she write in that letter?
Of course a meeting with Warren Buffet will help boost her fund’s cred. Right now her performance is only so-so.
After losing 12.9 percent in 2008 when the average hedge fund sank 19 percent during the height of the financial crisis, Permian came back to gain 13.9 percent last year, according to marketing materials.
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- Meet The 29-Year Old Hedge Fund Cutie Warren Buffet Just Asked Out To Lunch
- Here Is Exactly How Warren Buffett’s Chinese Auto Company BYD Copied Competitor Designs Piece By Piece
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WSJ’s Star Tech Reporter Jessica Vascellaro Is Leaving The Valley (NWS)
Silicon Valley’s reporters are breathing a deep sigh of relief. Competition for scoops just got a little easier.
The Wall Street Journal‘s star tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro is coming to New York to be the deputy of the paper’s media and marketing group, according to a Dow Jones rep.
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- Wall Street Journal Editor Alan Murray Gets His Hands On An Apple iPad
- Paranoid Steve Jobs Makes WSJ Editor Erase A Tweet Sent From The iPad
- Wall Street Journal Building A LinkedIn Killer
Hey, Google, This Is Why Privacy Matters (GOOG)
Forget users and privacy advocates, here’s why it matters that Google (GOOG) botched its Buzz roll-out with privacy flaws.
Google just announced new technology that will allow it to target ads to third-party Web site visitors based on their most recent Google search.
Hunch cofounder and New York VC Chris Dixon called the news “the most important Google announcement in a while.”
The problem is some people already think this kind of behavioral ad-targeting is an invasion of user privacy. We don’t feel that way, but imagine the headache Google will have now convincing those sorts of people after this whole Buzz mess.
A Google spokesperson reached us with this statement:
On February 10, 2010, we announced a change to the length of time we use a referral URL to improve ad matching on AdSense sites. This enhances our ability to contextually match ads to the content of a page on the AdSense network. The user’s search history is not used, only the terms in a single referral URL. The terms in the referral URL are kept for a few hours only and are not used to inform a user’s interest categories for purposes of interest-based advertising.
Here’s Google original announcement:
Better contextual matching
As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.
A “referral URL” is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.
Let’s see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I’m using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.
To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they’re part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).
We’ve recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we’re doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user’s browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.
This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let’s assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.
Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams’ continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.
Correction: Thanks to a bit of URL shortener confusion, an earlier version of this post had the wrong Google blog post in it. As a part of the confusion, we got the timing of the announcement wrong. We apologize for the errors.
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- Thanks To All Those Shills On Twitter And Facebook, People Don’t Trust Their Friends Anymore
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- Google Cracks Down On Cheap Drugs
Daily News Tycoon Mort Zuckerman Mulls A Run For New York Senate
Mort Zuckerman, the publisher of The Daily News and a real estate mogul, is considering a run for New York Senate, according to the New York Times.
Zuckerman, 72, would run as a Democrat,for a Senate seat currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand.
Mr. Zuckerman regards Ms. Gillibrand as vulnerable to a challenge and is convinced that, at a time of economic tumult and political unrest, his background as an outsider to government, and his record as a businessman, will appeal to the state’s electorate, these people said.
Read more at the New York Times.
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- Mort Zuckerman: Big City Commercial Real Estate Is Holding Up, Small Cities Are Toast
- Now Mort Zuckerman Says He Wants BusinessWeek, Too
- Madoff Victim Mort Zuckerman Doesn’t Blame Italians
Cravath Hits Back At Airgas, Calling Claims Of Conflict “Disingenuous”
Airgas is trying to convince a Pennsylvania court that Cravath should be conflicted out of representing Air Products in Air Products hostile takeover bid of Airgas.
We previously noted that Cozen O’Connor, counsel for Airgas, was not mincing words in attacking Cravath, which has previously done work for Airgas. You can’t decide when it suits your pleasure to drop one client like a hot potato,” name-partner Stephen Cozen said.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit is a sideshow to the true battle occurring between Airgas and Air Product in Delaware Chauncery court. Last night Cravath filed, on behalf of Air Products, an amended complaint that alleged that Airgas’ directors are not acting in good faith, in part by trying to attack Cravath’s representation of them.
Michael J. de la Merced, reporting for DealBook: In the new complaint, Air Products contends that Airgas’ attempt in Pennsylvania state court to bar Cravath from advising on the takeover bid is a “disingenuous” cheap shot. (Airgas has said for months that Cravath, which advised the company on more than a dozen financings, has confidential information that it then used to help a rival. Cravath has repeatedly denied those assertions.)
Read de la Merced’s full report — including Air Products contention that Goldman, who is Airgas’ primary adviser, has equal conflicts problems, here.
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- The 10 Most Powerful Partners At Cravath
- Cozen To Cravath: You Can’t Drop Your Clients Like A Hot Potato
- Cravath To Choose Some Associates Start Dates By Lottery System