Also: Marissa Mayer’s memo to Yahoo employees. And is popular crowd-funding startup Kickstarter in the business of ‘selling dreams’?
Yahoo CEO Mayer to get close to $60 million in compensation [ALLTHINGSD]
Yahoo revealed in a regulatory filing that it could be paying its new CEO Marissa Mayer a total of close to $60 million to turn the company around. The mega-sum includes salary, equity grants, stock options, a make-whole payment for the Google shares she left behind and, perhaps most remarkably, a $30 million one-time retention award. The amount, which is a whole lot more than what the last two Yahoo CEOs — Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson — were paid is, um, rather large.
“Yes, keep moving”: Marissa Mayer’s memo to Yahoos (Natch!) [ALLTHINGSD]
The company has been through a lot of change in the past few months, leaving many open questions around strategy and how to move forward. I am sensitive to this. While I have some ideas, I need to develop a more informed perspective before making strategy or direction changes. In the meantime, please do not stop. You are doing important work. Please don’t stop.
Is kickstarter selling dreams? [REUTERS]
And so it seems to me that Kickstarter is in some ways much like QVC was when it launched: a state-of-the-art sales and marketing platform. It’s highly social: Jeanne Pi has determined that your chances of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter are just 9% if you have 10 Facebook friends, rising to 20% if you have 100 friends, and 40% if you have 1,000 friends. And it’s done a very good job of walking the fine line between do-gooding, on the one hand (charity campaigns are specifically banned), and overt commercialism, on the other.
Kayak Software raises $91 million, prices IPO above range [BLOOMBERG]
Kayak, which first filed to go public in November 2010, is the first U.S. consumer Internet company to go public since Facebook Inc. (FB)’s troubled IPO in May. Norwalk, Connecticut-based Kayak delayed its roadshow after Facebook shares tumbled and is testing investor appetite for Web stocks now that the social- networking company has regained some of its losses.
Cameras act as ‘Black Boxes’ when cars and cyclists collide [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
Cyclists have long had a rocky co-existence with motorists and pedestrians, who often criticize bike riders for a confrontational attitude, and for blowing through stop signs or otherwise exempting themselves from the rules of the road. Now small cameras — the cycling equivalent of the black box on an airplane — are becoming an intermediary in the relationship, providing high-tech evidence in what is sometimes an ugly contest between people who ride the roads on two wheels and those who use four.
Don’t believe the doomsayers: Microsoft’s Q4 results are good news [READWRITEWEB]
The loss comes due to a $6.2 billion write-down for one of its acquisitions in early July and a deferral of $540 million of revenue related to the Windows Upgrade Offer. But with strong operating profits, the software giant still beat analyst expectations after adjusting for the one-time hits. Adjusted earnings came in at 73 cents per share on revenue of $18.6 billion. Wall Street observers were expecting an average EPS of 62 cents on $18.13 billion in revenue.
