MOTOROLA MOBILITY SHAREHOLDERS OVERWHELMING APPROVE GOOGLE ACQUISITION

Motorola Mobility on Thursday announced that stockholders voted to approve Google’s proposed $12.5 billion merger. At the company’s special stockholder meeting on Thursday, roughly 99% of Motorola shares voting cast their vote in favor of the acquisition, which amounts to $40 per share in cash for complete ownership of Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. ”We are pleased and gratified by the strong support we have received from our stockholders, with more than 99 percent of the voting shares voting in support of the transaction,” Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Google to realize the significant value this combination will bring to our stockholders and all the new opportunities it will provide our dedicated employees, customers, and partners.”

First announced back in August, Google intends to acquire Motorola Mobility and run it as a separate entity in terms of operations. As Google CEO Larry Page explained, however, patents are also a big part of the deal. Google intends to use the tens of thousands of patents it will control as a result of the merger as a new line of defense in a series of patent battles between its various Android partners and aggressively litigious companies like Apple and Microsoft.

NOKIA SHAREHOLDERS REBELLING AGAINST MICROSOFT DECISION

Not everyone is happy about Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, teaming up with Microsoft. Workers in Finland have voiced their displeasure by walking out and now a group of young shareholders is formulating an alternate strategy called "Nokia Plan B".

The shareholders, all of whom have experience working for the company, are happy with the decision to embrace Microsoft and will challenge that decision and strategy going forward.

The group has sent an open letter to other shareholders for support. The group needs to get elected as a majority to the Board of Directors at the next annual meeting on May 3rd. The open letter goes into great detail as to what agenda and concrete actions the group intends to pursue. The details of which are summarized below:

Agenda

• Return to high growth, high profitability strategy
• Maintain ownership of the software layer on Nokia products (read: no Windows OS)
• Introduce hiring strategy that targets young software talent
• Eliminate outdated and bureaucratic R&D policies to improve efficiency
• Avoid becoming poorly differentiated OEM with low margins and commodity products

Concrete Actions

• Immediate discharge of Stephen Elop as President and CEO of Nokia
• Restructure alliance with Microsoft as tactical exercise focused on North America
• MeeGo will become Nokia’s primary smartphone platform
• Increase the lifespan of Symbian to a minimum of 5 years
• Qt development to focus on MeeGo, but support Symbian too
• End of distributed R&D
• End of R&D outsourcing
• Leadership team shakeup
• Aggressively recruit young software engineers
• Strategy for S40 and Ovi platforms going forward

Overall, this strategy would see Nokia become a leaner company focused on MeeGo from a software perspective going forward. It would also see the average age of employees fall due to the new focus on young developers.

RUMOR: FACEBOOK GOING PUBLIC IN 2011

A rumor is floating around that Facebook will be going public in 2011. What started the rumor? An SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, not the Southereastern Conference, investigation. Even though Facebook is a privitely held company, it still issues shares. By law unless Facebook goes public they must keep the number of shareholders in their private company to under 500, but those 499 shareholders can then buy, sell and trade their stock without any oversight and that is what the SEC is irked about.

The SEC believes the unregulated shares have caused Facebook's value to be inflated by billions of dollars. Facebook really doesn't want the SEC to investigate them since some of the trades may not have been kosher and there may be over 500 shareholders. Because of this, Facebook can decide to become a public company and avoid the SEC investigation.

This is not unheard of. Google was forced to go public in 2004 to overcome the 500 shareholder rule. So Facebook really has two options, either buy out the shareholders or go public. Both have advantages and disadvantages, so it will be interesting to see what they do. [SF Gate]