The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

"The financial services sector is the bellwether sector for the IT industry because of its amount of spend on IT," she said. "The demise of banks such as Lehman creates a sudden, very large reduction in revenue for the IT sector."

Which is terrible news for companies like Dell, which is already seeing "conservatism in IT spending in the U.S., which had extended into Western Europe and several countries in Asia." Could be good news for eBay, though, if equipment needs to be auctioned to cover some of those billions in write-downs. (Photo by AP/Mary Altaffer)

From: Gopalkrishnan , Hari (Technology)

Sent: Sun Sep 14 19:51:49 2008

Subject: Business Support for Monday

Team,

Given the recent press reports regarding Lehman, I wanted to communicate that we are counting on you to be at work on Monday and ready for business as usual. In fact, I ask that you take the extra time necessary to coordinate with your teams to conduct a "ready for business" check on all mission critical activities before the day begins. As I learn more, I will communicate with you.

Thanks as always for your commitment.

Regards

Hari

On September 12, 2008 Lehman was told by banking regulators it will have to acquired by a solvent entity. Lehman executives have pleaded to delay the bad news by until September 13th, so that they can have a hand who acquires Lehman. Lehman has made a valid case in suggesting two or three buyers to the banking regulators.

The user in question, Ossworks, has a wide range of editing interests, but nothing indicating that they might have inside knowledge, much less psychic powers. Still, the edit correctly predicted the eventuality of, if not the motive behind, the company's "For Sale" sign.

Content is king, but only when you can enforce wildly profitable distribution rackets like "windowed" releases in different formats over time and in different places. But new media makers shouldn't be too gloomy — the courts of absolutist rulers always get the most wildly decadent just before heads roll. And then the new media Jacobins will need your propaganda just as much as the aristocracy ever did, if not more, but they'll demand a more ascetic approach.

The good news is that margins on the digital distribution business are insane compared to packaged and printed matter, and the margins on packaged and printed matter will only get better when you can sell it for a premium to a discerning clientele. Investors will move their money away from the publicly traded entertainers — it's been another record year for private equity, and digital-distribution enablers like Google and Apple are doing fine, thanks.

It's just a matter of changing the words to your tune to sing the praises of the new gatekeepers. Where you once might have had to kowtow to Sumner Redstone's minions, now it will be the likes of USC Film MFA David Siminoff, who signed up with Venrock instead of one of the major studios and will be the first to tell you he understands the "literature of what sites do."

(Photos by Elizabeth Borda)

The same way flatlining startups always do: the promise of an imminent IPO. Or at least that's what Trident Capital's Woody Marshall told VentureBeat.

Rumors reaching Valleywag from adult-industry sources indicate that Lehman Brothers was weighing a large investment in AdBrite — as much as 10 percent of the company — but decided to pass. That's a heavy blow for both AdBrite and its lead VC investor, Sequoia Capital, which frequently partners with Lehman. The reason for Lehman's cold feet? Apparently, AdBrite's involvement in the porn business was larger than bankers there had been led to believe — a fact that may have been uncovered during AdBrite's recent audit.