Christopher Calnan

Linda Bush made her pitch to Dell Inc. executives for the fifth consecutive year in July.

It was a proposal for quarterly dividends just 12 minutes into Dell’s (Nasdaq: DELL) annual shareholder meeting at the company’s Round Rock campus. Bush stood at the audience microphone as CEO Michael Dell and Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden stared blankly down from the stage.

HomeAway Inc. executives and investors quickly capitalized on the company’s initial public offering earlier this month.

The Austin-based company’s top four executives cashed in, selling thousands of shares of HomeAway (Nasdaq: AWAY) stock for nearly $9 million less than a week after the $216 million IPO.

The company’s major shareholders — like others in these cases — are bound by 180-day lock up agreements, meaning they’re prohibited from selling their common stock for the first six months after the IPO. But several investors and executives were mandated by the IPO to redeem preferred stock, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on July 5.

Austin Ventures — which owned 22 percent of the company, or about 18 million shares — generated more than $32 million selling Series A and Series B preferred stock.

When state agencies buy or upgrade technology they — and consequently taxpayers — usually spend a lot more time and money than originally expected, and the trend is getting worse.

According to a new report, which shows that on-time and on-budget performance for state information technology projects declined last year compared with 2009, 32 of 48 projects are on average 19 months late, and 24 of them average $2.7 million over budget.

A little more than a year after launching, the news on the online political news outlet Texas Tribune is mixed. Memberships have fallen short of expectations, but the organization attracted more donor money and website traffic than it had initially projected.

Despite the head-turning start led by former Texas Monthly editor and president Evan Smith, Tribune executives said the nonprofit website that covers state politics like a newspaper needs to attract more subscribers while it weans itself off contributions — but that’s still a long way off.

“We’re not ready to declare victory,” Tribune investor and Chairman John Thornton said, “but we’re encouraged.”

The love affair between venture capitalists and Austin information technology companies is cooling, but other sectors are filling the void.

The portion of the capital collected by local IT companies decreased from 89 percent of the total in 2003 to 55 percent last year. It’s not so much that investors are cold on IT. It’s more a function of the next generation of IT firms not needing venture capitalists as much.

Makers of Web-based tools, cloud computing solutions and open-source software simply don’t need loads of capital to pay for expensive development tools, racks of servers or even office space.

So where are venture capitalists turning? Several places, but mainly tried-and-true business sectors such as health care and financial services.

A lawsuit filed last month by an Austin woman is the latest in a string of gender-discrimination cases brought against Dell Inc., the computer giant with a human resources department allegedly described by a Dell executive as “one of the toughest old-boy networks” in the company.

The latest lawsuit, filed Dec. 22 by Ellen Fleming in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, is at least the third gender-discrimination case brought against Dell since October 2008.

Fleming, a former level D-3 executive at Round Rock-based Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) who held several finance and comptroller positions during 10 years at the company, alleges she was treated differently from male counterparts and was fired in March 2009 after refusing to quit when she was demoted.

The lawsuit also alleges that Dell withheld her annual bonus because Fleming declined to waive her rights to file a claim against the company. The Harvard-educated Fleming is now teaching at the Acton School of Business in Austin.

Google’s $6 billion offer to buy Groupon Inc. belies the reality that group buying is a crowded and immature sector in which local companies are experiencing varying levels of success. And while some are finding it difficult to attract investors, a new one is jumping into the mix with a healthy dose of investment capital.

Austin entrepreneurs said investors are hesitant to back local group-buying companies despite Chicago-based Groupon’s popularity and Google Inc.’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) recent attempt to buy it. Officials at Localiter LLC and GivEngine Inc. said they’re meeting few takers when seeking the expansion capital needed to grow their businesses in the Groupon tradition.

In contrast, Austin-based Moolala Inc. reported receiving $384,000 in funding from seven investors this week, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The group-buying company, which has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded in November, is led by Joshua Chodniewicz, the former CEO of California-based Art.com Inc.

When Treaty Oak Bank applied to the federal government for $3.3 million in financing in late 2008, the bank projected to post a $198,000 profit during 2009. Instead, it posted a $6.9 million loss.

The Austin-based bank, which was placed under a consent order by federal regulators in February and agreed last month to be bought by a Fort Worth company, received the capital by selling equity to the government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, according to its October 2008 application filed with the Treasury Department.

The federal government essentially became a shareholder in the community bank that reported a rapidly rising number of nonperforming loans during an 18-month period. Now, two years later, it’s unclear how much that equity investment is worth — if anything at all.

The asset value of the Ex-Students Association of the University of Texas took a major hit during the last fiscal year as investments in public markets plunged.

But the organization that’s best known as Texas Exes still managed to post nearly $60 million in assets, making it one of the largest in the nation.

The sharp decline prompted by the volatile stock markets during the recession has been mirrored by most other alumni association endowments. Yet Texas Exes learned from the experience and last year hired a management firm that’s taking a more conservative approach by reducing its reliance on publicly traded equities, officials said.

For the year ending April 30, 2009, Texas Exes’ assets slumped to $59.7 million compared with $83.9 million during the previous year, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Dell Inc. spent nearly $3 million last year for lobbyists working on a variety of bills before Congress, including multiple measures related to worker rights.

The spending came in the same year that Round Rock-based Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) settled a $9.1 million class-action gender-discrimination lawsuit projected to involve more than 2,000 female Dell employees and former employees.

Federal lobbying reports indicate that the company’s lobbyists were active in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 and the Paycheck Fairness Act, both of which promote equal pay for women.

Dell officials said company lobbyists were “tracking” the gender discrimination legislation rather than actively lobbying in opposition to the bills. But the company acknowledged that it is opposing another proposed measure that would enable workers to have their day in court during disputes with employers.