$$$ Bill Gross: Debt Solution ‘A Few Years Away,” Dollar ‘At Risk’ [CNBC]

$$$ Fire your hedge fund, hire your Congressman [Barron's]

$$$ RIL-DE Shaw venture to offer entire spectrum of services [Business Standard]

$$$ In Brazil, The Bikini Wax Is A Harbinger Of Inflation [BusinessWeek]

$$$ Pickens: We’re fueling terror by paying OPEC [CNBC]

$$$ That’s it for us today. We’re off Monday for the holiday, enjoy the long weekend and see you on Tuesday!

$$$ Roubini Sees Stock-Correction ‘Tipping Point’ [Bloomberg]

$$$ Shadow Banking Makes A Comeback [DealBook]

$$$ HSBC Shareholder Vent Anger [WSJ]

$$$ William Ackman said he found Harvard College “a pretty WASPy place.”
“So what did I do? I joined the crew team to meet some other Jewish kids.” The chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management LP gave a rather intimate biography last night — beginning with his circumcision, ending with marrying a Jewish girl (to his parent’s delight) — as the keynote speaker of the Hillel Renaissance Award dinner. [Bloomberg]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

A senior staffer, allegedly, which he preferred no one know about. Making this slightly awkward.

Former Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Fred Goodwin obtained an injunction to keep the media from reporting allegations that he had a “relationship” with a senior colleague, a U.K. lawmaker said during a public hearing in Parliament today.

“Every tax payer has a direct public interest in the events leading up to the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, so how can it be right for a super-injunction to hide the alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a senior colleague?” Ben Stoneham asked. “If true, it would be a serious breach of corporate governance and not even the Financial Services Authority would be allowed to know about it.”

[Bloomberg]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

In a video accompanying a 40-page slide show describing AIG’s attributes, businesses and financial goals, Chief Executive Robert Benmosche said “there is no more crisis” for the bailed-out insurance company, which now has “lots of growth opportunities,” in his view. Alluding to recent tensions over the size and potential price of the stock offering that AIG and the U.S. Department of the Treasury launched this week, Mr. Benmosche said in the video: “Our sense is we have an incredible valuation opportunity here and we’re just not going to give it away. “If we don’t get the value today, then we’re going to get the value tomorrow… We’re not going to give 100% of the value away and sell it too cheap,” Mr. Benmosche said. [WSJ]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Nvidia, the largest stand-alone maker of graphics chips, beat earnings estimates for its first fiscal quarter ended May 1, thanks to stronger PC graphics chip  sales and the beginning of revenues from its Tegra mobile chip business.

It is starting to look like Nvidia is doing a good job balancing its investment in two markets: PCs and mobile devices. If it can do this, it will be able to adapt from one era of computing to another, a trick that few companies can say they have done.

The company reported a net profit of $135.2 million, or 22 cents a share, down about 2 percent from $137.6 million, or 23 cents a share a year ago. Revenue was $962 million, down 4 percent from $1 billion a year ago due to pricing pressure in the PC market. Analysts expected revenue of $947.8 million.

Adjusted income was 27 cents a share. Analysts were expecting Nvidia to report earnings of 19 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Shares of Nvidia rose a few percent after closing at $20.50 a share, up 3 percent in trading on Thursday.

“Our core GPU businesses are solid, with expanding revenues and margins. And this quarter, our Tegra
mobile business took off,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia.

Tegra and Tegra 2 chips are used in the latest smartphones and tablet computers. Those mobile chips represent Nvidia’s big effort to stay on the leading edge of graphics and to diversify away from PC graphics chip sales. Nvidia earlier this week bought Icera, a maker of baseband wireless communications processors. Huang said that deal means that Nvidia now makes the two most important chips in mobile devices.

Nvidia’s consumer product business generated $122 million in the quarter, up 78 percent from a year ago. That business includes sales of Tegra chips as well as products for embedded devices. Nvidia said that notebook graphics chips sales took off, particularly as many computer makers used Nvidia’s chips alongside Intel’s Sandy Bridge microprocessors (which combine graphics and processors in a single chip).

Tags: graphics chips, smartphones, tablets, Tegra, Tegra 2

Companies: Nvidia

People: Jen Hsun Huang

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

If you’re a workaholic at a tech startup (or anywhere else), it’s probably a challenge to make sure you’re eating tasty, healthy meals, at least if you aren’t being fed by the chefs at a company like Google. So a startup called Gobble just launched an online marketplace where you can order home-cooked meals for pickup and delivery.

Gobble is currently in beta testing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it also announced that it has raised $1.2 million in funding. On its frequently asked questions page, the Palo Alto, Calif. company describes itself as “peer-to-peer lasagna” and says it can serve both individuals and companies that want to feed their workers.

When I was growing up, I remember my parents (both workaholic engineers) would sometimes order meals from friends. This is a similar idea, but on a larger scale and searchable. Users go to the site, enter their geographic area, then see a list of meals they can purchase. They can narrow their search based on date (Gobble doesn’t support same-day orders), dietary restrictions, and by using tags like “cheesy” and “meaty”.

Gobble says chefs apply to work with the company and are selected based on their personality, knowledge, and the quality of their food. Several of them are also nutritionists who specialize in creating healthy meals.

The company is founder and chief executive Ooshma Garg’s second startup. She says that the idea emerged, in part, from her experience at her first company, Anapata, where she found herself eating fast food and takeout three times a day. Gobble’s investors include Greylock Discovery Fund, Felicis Ventures (which also invested in VentureBeat), Founder Collective, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel.

Companies: Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund, Gobble, Greylock, SV Angel

People: Ooshma Garg, Ron Conway

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said he is not stepping down, despite media reports that he has plans to resign. Blankfein spoke to reporters after Goldman’s annual meeting in Jersey City, N.J., on Friday…One well known shareholder, Evelyn Y. Davis, suggested at the start of the meeting that Blankfein should step down once the session was over. When asked by reporters why he wanted to stay, Blankfein quipped, “And give up all this?” [Reuters]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Allen Weintraub is a convicted felon who’s racked up his share of securities violations and, in 2007, filed for bankruptcy. He’s also a man with a dream- several in fact- that last March, he went after. In short, Weintraub wanted to buy AMR Corp- all of it. Eastman Kodak Company, too. And unlike some people, who are all talk and not a lot of action, Weintraub set out to make his dreams a reality.

In the AMR case, Weintraub sent a letter March 29 to “Gerald Arpey” offering $9.75 per share of AMR stock, an offer worth about $3.25 billion. Gerard Arpey is chairman, president and chief executive of AMR. That followed Weintraub’s March 19 offer for all shares of Kodak for about $1.3 billion.

Apparently Weintraub initiative wasn’t cool with the SEC, which filed a suit against him today, that Weintraub would characterize as bull shit typical of people trying to hold him down.

In the suit filed Tuesday in a federal district court in Florida, the SEC alleges that Allen Weintraub and his Sterling Global Holdings “have substantially no assets” and “lack the means to complete the tender offers.”

In its complaint, the SEC said Weintraub tried to obtain bank financing for his tender offers for Kodak and AMR, but banks turned him down…On April 26, Weintraub sent a follow-up letter to Arpey urging him to negotiate with him. “I won’t even address the personal comments, because in my opinion they are without merit,” Weintraub wrote.

Why can’t people step back and give him room to work? If he says he’ll pay, he’ll pay. Fascists.

[Dallas News]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

$$$ The death of bin Laden could create even more instability to the Middle East and northern African nations now undergoing turmoil, potentially driving up oil prices and creating more economic strife for the U.S. and other developed countries. “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but I’m not sure [it is] great,” Ruben Vardanian, chief executive of the Moscow-based asset management company Troika Dialog Group, told a moderator at the Milken Conference. [MarketWatch]

$$$ Debt-Limit Deniers Don’t Buy ’Chicken Little’ Warnings [Bloomberg]

$$$ Buffett [with a 25 pound box of See's peanut brittle] Believes Reputation After Sokol Is Still Intact [Reuters]

$$$ Steve Cohen may pick up $55 million in pocket change on two paintings [Bloomberg]

$$$ Study: Paul Krugman Is America’s Most Correct Columnist [Daily Intel]

$$$ Ex-Lawyer For Kenneth Star Admits Role In Fraud [WSJ]

$$$ Rejecting Wall Street, Business School Graduates Turn To Entrepreneurship [Dealbook]

$$$ Ross Says It `Was Time to Harvest‘ ICG Investment‎ [Bloomberg via WaPo]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

PapayaMobile, the Chinese mobile social game platform start-up, has raised $18 million in a second round of funding. It’s another sign that mobile gaming is heating up.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its ecosystem of Android developers in both the U.S. and Europe, said Si Shen (pictured), chief executive and co-founder of PapayaMobile. The company makes a platform for game developers, who use it to create mobile games with social features that can spread quickly and be easily monetized.

The amount of money is typical of deals in mobile games these days. The market has heated up since Japan’s DeNA bought rival Ngmoco for $403 million last year, and Japan’s Gree bought another rival, OpenFeint, last week for $104 million.

The round was led by Keytone Ventures, a Chinese venture firm and DCM. The company launched its Papaya game platform last year to help developers spread their games through social means. Much like rivals — OpenFeint, Scoreloop and Ngmoco — PapayaMobile gets mobile users to spread games and make them more social via leaderboards, cross promotion, and multiplayer competition.

Shen said that the company has more than 350 developers using its tools, and those developers have more than 15 million users on Google’s Android mobile operating system. In China, Android’s growth over the next two years will be “staggering,” said Joe Zhou, managing partner of Keytone Ventures. PapayaMobile, based in Beijing, is in a good spot to compete in the market, he said.

DCM originally invested $4 million in PapayaMobile in 2010, so the company has now raised $22 million to date. Since launching in June, 2010, PapayaMobile’s user base has grown more than 375 percent. Shen and chief technology officer Qian Wenji founded PapayaMobile in 2008. The company said that some of the popular games in Papaya’s network are earning over $125,000 per month.

Tags: mobile games, social gaming, social mobile gaming platform

Companies: DeNA, Gree, Ngmoco, OpenFeint, PapayaMobile, Scoreloop

People: Si Shen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Net income dropped 21 percent but it still beat expectations so high-fives all around!

Goldman…today reported net revenues of $11.89 billion and net earnings of $2.74 billion for the first quarter ended March 31, 2011. Diluted earnings per common share were $1.56 compared with $5.59 for the first quarter of 2010 and $3.79 for the fourth quarter of 2010. Annualized return on average common shareholders’ equity (ROE) (2) was 12.2% for the first quarter of 2011.

Excluding the preferred dividend of $1.64 billion related to the redemption of the firm’s Series G Preferred Stock, diluted earnings per common share were $4.38 (1) and annualized ROE was 14.5% (1) for the first quarter of 2011.

“We are pleased with our first quarter results,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Generally improving market and economic conditions, coupled with our strong client franchise, produced solid results. Looking ahead, we continue to see encouraging indications for economic activity globally.”

GOLDMAN SACHS REPORTS FIRST QUARTER EARNINGS PER COMMON SHARE OF $1.56 [GS]
Goldman Sachs First-Quarter Profit Tops Analysts’ Estimates [Bloomberg]
Goldman Sachs Earnings, Sales Beat Wall Street Views [Reuters]
Goldman Beats Estimates Despite 21% Dip [FT]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker