JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan estimates that AOL is worth $4.2 billion. As you know, AOL is preparing to spin off from parent company Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX). When Google bought a 5% stake in AOL back in 2005, the valuation of AOL was estimated to be about $5.5 billion.

To make Khan’s estimates even credible, Rich Greenfield of Pali Capital pegged AOL’s valuation to be around $4 billion also. The valuation is based on the following estimates by JP Morgan.

As AOL prepares to spin off from AOL, they have been making a few managerial changes. The company dismissed the COO and SVP earlier this month and also hired Brad Garlinghouse from Yahoo!

NewEgg.com is an online retail company that sells electronics such as digital cameras, cell phones, and laptops. The company plans to file for an IPO and raised roughly $175 million in the process. NewEgg.com started in 2001 and made about $2.2 billion in revenues last year. Insight Venture Partners invested $20 million in NewEgg.com around 2005. Insight Venture Partners has a 12.7% stake in NewEgg.

Newegg.com Inc. is based in City of Industry, California. Newegg was founded by Fred Chang and the company is run by CEO Tally C. Liu. When NewEgg.com was founded, it was a subsidiary of ABS Computer Technologies Inc. NewEgg has about 1,500 employees. The funds raised will be used to fund operations expansion in Canada and China. The company has even been profitable since they started in 2001. The IPO is being managed by JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citi.

Earlier this week, Microsoft Corporation has sold $3.75 billion worth of bonds to their investors.  The sale gave investors a small amount of extra yield over Treasury bonds.  Microsoft has a credit rating of AAA.  This was the first time that the company ever offered a long-term bond offering.

Why did Microsoft want to raise all of this extra cash?  Perhaps they want to look into more acquisitions.  Microsoft said that they wanted to take advantage of good market conditions and their great credit rating.  On September 22, 2008 Microsoft’s board of directors authorized an offering of up to $6 billion in debt.

“Someone probably told them there is no AAA paper out there, and there’s demand for the name for diversification,” stated bond trader and co-head of structured products/emerging markets at MF Global Andrew Brenner. “It’s pretty good for long-term money.”

AAA-rated corporate debt yields are about 211 basis points about the Treasurys.  JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley took the lead of the bond sale.

[via MarketWatch]

DigitalGlobe is a Longmont, Colorado based company that sells space imagery and geospatial content. DigitalGlobe also operates a remote sensing spacecraft. The company was started in 1992 and has 350 employees. Some of their customers include Google (Google Earth, Google Maps), GeoEye, Spot Image, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

The company is planning for an IPO this month in order to raise money for building a new satellite.  They were planning to go IPO last year but postponed it due to the weak economy.  Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Citi, UBS Investment Bank, JPMorgan, and Jefferies will be handling the offering.  Lehman will be helping despite their Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Lehman has $20 million in debt owed by DigitalGlobe.  After the IPO, Lehman also has the right to appoint five out of nine of DigitalGlobe’s board members due to being a large enough investor.  DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 orbiter will cost roughly $283 million which will be fully paid for after going IPO.

GeoEye Inc. is DigitalGlobe’s biggest competitor.  GeoEye is based in Dulles, Virginia and they employ about 130 people.  DigitalGlobe earned about $95.8 million on $151.7 million in revenue in 2007.

DigitalGlobe will be the fifth IPO this year in the United States.

[via alarmclock/StreetInsider]

Amazon.com announced today that they are investing in Bill Me Later, Inc. Not only that, but Amazon is also signing a agreement with the online billing company as well. eBay and PayPal has thus far proved the synergy of combining an online retailer with an online billing payment company. Over 90% of all eBay auctions are paid via PayPal so it made sense for eBay to buy them for $1.5 billion.

“Bill Me Later has developed a very customer-centric method to make online shopping even easier,” stated Matt Swann, VP of payments at Amazon.com. “We are pleased to make the convenience of Bill Me Later available to our tens of millions of Amazon customers [source: Amazon.com press release].”

The investment terms were not disclosed, but the company has $200 million in funding capital according to TechCrunch. Bill Me Later investors include Chase Paymentech, Azure Capital Partners, First Data Corp, Crosspoint Venture Partners, GRP Partners, CIT Group Inc., Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, Citigroup, Equifax, T. Rowe Price, and Legg Mason Inc.

“Amazon.com and Bill Me Later share the same commitment to making shopping easy for consumers,” stated Gary Marino, the CEO of Bill Me Later. “Just as Amazon invented a new and better way for people to shop online, Bill Me Later has created a new and better way for people to pay for purchases online.”

Before joining Bill Me Later, Marino was an EVP, Chief Credit Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer of consumer lending at First USA/Bank One.

Amount Invested: Undisclosed
Series: Angel
TheBig is a video channel website that is based in India. The company has raised angel funding from Suhel Seth and Swapan Seth. Suhel is a Managing Partner with Counselage and Swapan is the CEO of Equus Red Cell. Gaggan Duggal and Chetan Sharma were also investors. Chetan is a consultant for ZeeTV and Duggal is the founder of Matrix, a brand name in international calling cards.

TheBig does not focus on strictly user generated content, but also has original programming. Some of TheBig’s original programming includes Sudarshan: The Lonely Boy, Professor Aye Tein, News With Leela Loose, and Agony Tau.

“With the progressive emancipation of bandwidth and the acutely swift growth of the Internet, we see a long term play in this space. Www.thebig.tv is also very different from a concept like YouTube. YouTube only uploads third party provided content. With www.thebig.tv, there is a lot of content creation from the site itself. Furthermore, over time we will also be offering films that can be downloaded,” stated Swapan Seth.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $250-$500K
Series: Seed Financing
iFamily gained popularity as a Facebook geneaology application. Below is a screen shot of the application when it is active in a profile:

iFamily’s investor is a boutique investment banking company called CountryRoad Capital. iFamily has about 83,000-plus total profiles and the company was recently given a valuation of about $1 million.

“This investment from CountryRoad Capital will allow iFamily to accelerate its product and business development and sustain its leadership position as the first and foremost genealogy application on Facebook,” stated Ilya Nikolayev, the CEO of iFamily. “CountryRoad has a distinguished track record of identifying and catalyzing unique emerging technology opportunities and we are pleased to partner with CountryRoad’s Managing Partner Andrew Merkatz and his team. Rather than take an existing genealogy application and try to bend it to work within Facebook, and rather than develop a competing family oriented social network, we have chosen to build this application from the bottom up to fully leverage and integrate the power of Facebook. I believe this market positioning is unique and will allow us to drive significant value for our shareholders.”

CountryRoad Capital also invested in SocialMedia.com, the parent company of other Facebook Applications: Happy Hour, Trakzor, Foodfight.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $28 Million Total
Series: Second Round ($14 Million)
Veveo is the company that created Vtap, a mobile video/Internet search service. The company’s official launch date is September 10th according to VentureBeat.

Vtaps’s search technology focuses on predictive technology rather than the number of incoming links that Google’s PageRank uses. An example that VentureBeat provides is that if you type “Gwy,” then Vtap will suggest Gwenyth Paltrow as the top result. And then users can seamlessly watch clips that feature Paltrow in them.

The investors in Veveo include Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners. Murali Aravamudan is currently the CEO of Veveo and is a former researcher at Bell Labs.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $1.7 Million
Series: Series A
Vadver is a start-up site that is aiming to become a video-discovery service. Draper Fisher Jurvetson invested $1.7 million in the company. Vadver is run by Patrick Koppula.

Koppula is also part of iLike.com, Gcast.com, GarageBand.com. Vadver is based in San Francisco.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $6.75 Million Total
Series: 2nd Round ($4.5 Million)
Federated Media Publishing is company that acts as a brokerage for advertisements to be placed on some of the top web publication and news companies including Digg, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Mashable, Alarm:Clock, Ars Technica, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Wikia etc. Inevitably, Pulse 2.0 (P2) is aiming to become a client too, but P2 is still in the growth phase.

Federated Media was founded by John Battelle, author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and co-founding editor of Wired. Investors that participated in this round of funding includes JPMorgan and Omidyar Network (started by eBay’s founder).
[Source: PEHub]

TheMarkets.com is a website that reports financial resources and estimations to institutional investors.  Today the company announced that it has “completed a $30 million Series S Rights Offering to its existing broker-owners^[1].”

“This investment is a tangible validation of our business model to provide value-added content and workflow solutions to the buy-side,” stated David Eisner, the CEO and President of TheMarkets.com. “Together with our already strong cash flow and balance sheet, this round of financing will propel our growth in the coming years. The funding will enable us to pursue strategic investments and acquisitions, as we continue to expand globally by leveraging our existing distribution platform and our unique relationships with the sell-side to introduce new products and services requested by our clients.”

Who owns TheMarkets.com?  The company was formed in 2000 by eleven of the top investment banks: Banc of America Securities, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank.  The site also offers information regarding company financial filings and pending equity deals straight from the source.  TheMarkets.com is based in New York and also has offices in London.

TheMarkets.com serves over 1500 firms in 43 countries.  “TheMarkets.com has a proven management team and a sound business model,” stated Mark Steinert, a new Board Member of and also a Global Head of Research at UBS. “We view the Company as an ideal vehicle through which to develop new tools for the buy-side that uniquely leverage our services, and we were delighted to be a significant investor in the round.”

[1] TheMarkets.com Press release: TheMarkets.com Closes $30 Million to Fund Strategic Growth Plans

References:
[2] PaidContent: Online Financial Researcher TheMarkets.com Closes $30 Million Investment