Henry Blodget

Get the future of Facebook right from the horse’s mouth

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Business Insider has covered several deal-of-the-day-type Web sites, so it decided to launch one of its own: Pipeline, which is set to launch next week, will focus on more high-end items, as it is targeted toward executives. The email from Business Insider CEO and editor Henry Blodget:

Hello! We’re launching a new service at Business Insider that I wanted to tell you about and invite you to sign up for.

If you’re like me, you’ve been eagerly watching the growth of the many “daily deals” companies, hoping that lots of stuff will come along that you’ll want to buy. And you’ve been disappointed to see that most of these deals seemed designed for 18-year olds.

Where are the deals for business executives, you wonder? Where can you find stuff YOU want to buy?

Well, happily, the answer is now Business Insider.

In a week or so, we’ll be launching a new service called Pipeline that will provide Business Insider members with special deals that we’ve negotiated with you in mind.

What kind of deals will Pipeline offer? Subscriptions to business services, high-end business clothes, event tickets, you name it.

How can you get in on these deals? Just click here and we’ll let you know by email every time we launch one.

I hope you enjoy Pipeline. Thanks again for being a part of the Business Insider community.

Valleywag’s Ryan Tate has the wrap on last night’s Founder’s Club Internet Week bash here in New York:

There were so many old-media bigwigs at the Internet Week event, it’s surprising there were any admission badges left for Web startups. Bonnie Fuller, Jeff Zucker, Steven Brill and Jimmy Fallon joined Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Myspace’s Jon Miller and AOL’s Tim Armstrong represented the new blood. There was enough space left over for a substantial contingent of New York Web entrepreneurs; the rope-line squeeze might have erupted into a media war had more of Silicon Valley turned up for Gotham’s promotional festivities.

Gawker’s Nick Denton, Mahalo’s (and formerly Weblogs, Inc.’s) Jason Calacanis and Business Insider’s Henry Blodget.

Our boss was there too, Tweeting away…

Henry Blodget‘s Silicon Alley Media gives the Huffington Post treatment (in layout, not topicality) to its three blogs.

The Business Insider, launched today, aggregates Silicon Alley Insider, Clusterstock and The Business Sheet, into one site.

“Our goal is to build the leading online business news brand for the digital age,” said Blodget in a release. “Readers have responded to the real-time news and analysis our targeted sites present.”

Blodget also hired Dan Colarusso, former managing editor of Portfolio.com, as its new managing editor, responsible for day-to-day editorial operations of the sites.

The aggregated site has a draw of 2 million monthly uniques and 7 million page views.

The fallout is still in progress from the failed Microsoft-Yahoo merger: Silicon Alley Insider‘s Henry Blodget writes that as Yahoo’s share price continues to fall in the wake of the collapsed deal, the one that Yahoo struck with Google in place of it won’t matter in the end.

“If Yahoo continues to lose share—and there’s no reason to expect it won’t—the Google deal will rapidly become less and less relevant,” Blodget writes. “It doesn’t matter if you improve monetization of queries if your share of queries continues to shrink.”

A deal with Microsoft would have allowed Yahoo to focus on what it is best at, which is content aggregation, content production, and display ads, Blodget added. We’d like to throw in plain old Web technology, because many of Yahoo’s products such as Mail and all of its mobile apps are quite good.

Not that it could matter in the end. “Yahoo’s stock accomplished the near-impossible on Friday—declining almost 5% on a day when the market was up 400 points,” Blodget said. “Most likely this was because investors continue to realize that, Google deal or no, Yahoo’s search business is headed down the tubes.”

And now, the gloves come off.

Silicon Alley Insider‘s Henry Blodget writes that—see if you can follow this—a source close to Yahoo, a source close to Microsoft, and Carl Icahn all disagree about a central piece of the search proposal that Yahoo rejected over the weekend: whether or not Icahn would be given control of Yahoo.

As Blodget says, this part was really important because it “was an obvious deal-killer.” How did we get to this point? Blodget gives a play by play of what went down over the weekend and then summarizes it for us:

“Here’s what we think happened: We think Carl Icahn’s personal agenda screwed up what otherwise might have been a reasonable search offer from Microsoft. (This is one hazard of having a deal-broker who also has major skin in the game.) We think Microsoft has since recognized this and is running as far from Carl as it can.

“Microsoft does not care about anything but Yahoo’s search business,” Blodget continued. “All of the other terms in the convoluted proposal—dividends, tender offers, Asian assets, loans, etc.—are just a sop to Carl Icahn and other Yahoo shareholders still annoyed about the blown merger deal. These terms are obscuring a Microsoft search offer that is starting to get interesting.”