The figure doesn't look very large relative to Google's $12 billion in cash and marketable securities. But thrown in with the $200 million the company chooses not to earn from ads placed on image searches, or the $110 million it could make by tossing the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from the homepage, or the money Google could save by slowing its hiring to just a few thousand engineers a year, and you've got a company that's very fortunate to be in a business where it can throw away substantial amounts of cash without anybody noticing.

*In the sense of "persuading, especially with flattery," you dirty birds. What did you think I meant by "canoodling"?

We can't see AOL making a serious run at Yahoo, whose Finance and News portals are tops in share in their respective markets and are a big reason for the continued success of the company. However, it's a good start. AOL, at the least, needs to keep its fleeing dial-up users before it's too late. But is it too little, too late? Probably. Yahoo Finance's producers are clever enough to put Valley fox Sarah Lacy front and center. Even the revamped AOL finance site has nothing close to her.

(Photo by mav.mbecker.net)

Remember Yahoo FinanceVision? It was Yahoo's attempt to imitate CNBC, except on your computer. Launched in 2000, with an annoyingly overenthusiastic commercial embedded above, dragged on for two years before declining online advertising revenues put a bullet in it. We hear it's rising from the grave. We've confirmed that BusinessWeek columnist and certified Valley Fox Sarah Lacy has been signed as a talking head. Other rumored contributors include VC blogger and TV pundit Paul Kedrosky and manflesh connoisseur Henry Blodget, the disgraced Wall Street analyst and founder of Silicon Alley Insider. Blodget, at least, has experience talking up stocks.

When I was reporting on the meltdown of Mackey's dotcom spinoff, WholePeople, some Whole Foods employees whispered to me about Mackey's love of Yahoo Finance's message boards. It was a tip I didn't have time to follow up on as I chased down the details of how Mackey's absences, followed by meddling, botched WholePeople's launch. Towards the very end of my reporting, days before the story went to press, Mackey answered some questions by email. And that's where he almost — almost — gave himself away.

Whole Foods had agreed to sell what was left of WholePeople to Gaiam, an e-commerce company founded by Jirka Rysavy, a close friend of Mackey. Mackey agreed to be Gaiam's co-CEO. I asked him if that role would distract him from running Whole Foods. Here's what he told me on July 15, 2000:

I'll decrease my involvement there as the transition is complete.... My title of co-CEO of Gaiam.com is largely titular and transitional.

I doubt Mackey will stay heavily involved with Gaiam.com. I expect his CEO role is more transitional and titular.

John M. Thompson, CEO of Symantec, according to Google Finance

Hooray! Silicon Valley has black people! They're just disguised as white people!

Symantec Corporation [Google Finance]
The New Symantec [Symantec]

Today, says Google Finance, Google Inc. is worth $10.09 less per share than this morning. That's:

$323 mil less for Sergey - time to buy a cheaper bullwhip.
$331 mil less for Larry - No prob, he doesn't care, he'll keep smiling, he loves his girl, HE'S HAPPY DAMMIT.

Google Inc. [Google Finance]

Which is fine, and Handheld is surely a fine upstanding company. Just that the Mercury News says 54 percent of reverse mergers fail within two years.

And that reverse mergers are an old tactic for corrupt stock dumps.

And that Handheld lost $2.3 million in the first nine months of 2005.

And that one of the few Google results for its two-week-old stock symbol is a blog post that basically reads, "Don't invest in them. They're not making money."

Page's brother uses tactic with tainted history [Mercury News]
Handheld Entertainment (ZVue) Sort of Goes Public [SharkJumping]

Update: I don't know a thing about finance. A reader explains why, in great detail, after the jump.

Forgot to include the caveat in this entry: I'm just messing around with the Carl Page story, and did not mean to actually imply any knowledge whatsoever of real financial dealings. Here's one reader's e-mail explaining why Carl Page doesn't suck.

This was a really bad post which seems to just highlight a lack of knowledge with respect to finance and especially financial engineering. You should really be sending this kind of post past a few investment bankers, consultants or MBA types before putting it up rather than just going for some cheap shots based on bad Mercury News reporting.

Reverse mergers tend to be used as an inexpensive and fast way of raising capital. You bypass the skim of the typical M&A house and can get money without having to pay for the bridge financing (provided by your underwriters or VCs) that takes you through the months of an IPO. It's a great way to go public and raise money for companies that are ill-served or ill-matched for the VC funding model and not big enough or developed enough for a classic IPO, where the typical process's fees represent a minimal amount of the money raised. The reason why so many reverse mergers go bad is that they tend to be early stage companies. It is an especially popular tactic in the resources sector, where exploratory startups typically raise money in public markets rather than through private sources such as VC as is the case in Tech.

So should one be more cautious about buying shares in a reverse takeover? Sure. Is it because they are crooked? Uhh, no.

As to why Google Financial isn't showing much info on Handheld: cause it's not trading on an exchange, but rather in the Over The Counter: Bulletin Board (aka OTC:BB, aka ".OB"). When you look up other OTC stocks, you don't find their information listed on Google Financial either.

OTC stocks and reverse takeovers tend to be very risky. They are very speculative (either based on high risk new ventures, or a stock is OTC because it was delisted due to significant problems and is a turn around story) and have small market caps. Have their been a number of crooked things happening in these stocks? Yes, just as there have been many crooked things happening in other public and private companies, and in charities, government, education... Implying that 54% fail due to pump and dump is just wrong.

I'm a big fan of the site, loved the Larry and Lucy pics (big props on getting on CNBC), you've been writing some great stuff and are really committing to the project by leaving school to do it. But on these posts, you're wrong, you're bad, and it doesn't seem like you know what you're doing.

Wow. Points taken, lesson learned, and big bouquets of flowers sent to the Page brothers.

Yahoo Finance shows HNDH.OB bouncing from $6 to $6.80 (on a path drawn by Harold and the Purple Crayon). Google Finance, not so much. Search in Google Proper and it isn't sure what you want.

Man, Larry, help a brother out!

Handheld Entertainment [Google Finance]
Handheld Entertainment [Yahoo Finance]

Last night, Google's front-page link to Finance went to a big old 404 message. So the link was taken down, despite scads of blog posts celebrating the new service.

But hey, that's what the beta tag is for. Everything worked by morning, and on opening day, Google Finance ran a victorious headline: "Google Finance launches and Japan beats Cuba." Good job, headline relevancy algorithm. Good job.

Google Finance [Google]