Activist investor Carl Icahn faces a long haul in getting enough board support to push through his hopes of getting eBay to spin off PayPal. EBay (EBAY) surprised Wall Street on Wednesday with news that Icahn had taken a 0.82% stake in the payments and e-commerce giant and has proposed that it spin off its lucrative PayPal payments unit into a separate company. The veteran corporate raider, who has grabbed stakes and pushed for changes at other
Uncertainty still permeates the economy, but 2013 marked a banner year for online equity crowdfunding, driven by an appetite for products on the tech vanguard. “There’s a whole community out there of early adopters,” said Sean Ramsay, CEO of Bubl Technology. “And it’s growing.” Toronto-based Bubl’s Bublecam, a baseball-sized 360-degree camera, attracted more than three times the $100,000 in Canadian dollars ($92,000 U.S.) of R&D funding the
Microsoft surprised Wall Street with December-quarter earnings and sales that trounced expectations, but said nothing about its ongoing search for a new CEO. The Redmond, Wash.-based company late Thursday said it earned 78 cents a share in its fiscal second quarter, up 3% from the year-earlier quarter and beating the consensus forecast of analysts by 10 cents. Microsoft (MSFT) posted sales of $24.52 billion, up 14%, besting Wall Street’s target of